Thanks for your comment. I added the published dates and if the MG books were written by autistic authors. Of the 17 middle grade books, 11 are from the last 10 years.

I will check out Speak Up! Thanks for the recommendation.

Part of my language use was an SEO strategy — to have a few different words and phrases in the article that people might still use when searching so they can find the book list. I think it’s mostly all updated to autistic now. Thanks for catching that.

I appreciate you making a post about autistic characters in juvenile fiction. I did have a question though.

How many of those middle grade books are by autistic authors and how many of them are by allistic (non-autistic) ones? How many were published in the last five years? I know a lot of autistic middle grade books have been published very recently and I’m only seeing one or two of the recent ones on this list.

I know there’s a huge disconnect between parents of autistic children and autistic adults writing about autism, so I always recommend factoring in whether the book is by an autistic author or was researching by speaking to autistic individuals about their experience when recommending books.

I also noticed you switching back and forth on the language. When it’s not specified, I recommend sticking to autistic as that’s what the community uses, which I think you’ve mostly done, but you also swapped between pretty much every option. Is that because you’re mirroring the book’s language?

I did notice you did a fantastic job identifying the picture books about autistic characters by autistic authors! I’ve ordered some of those for my library as well.

If you ever branch into graphic novels, I recommend checking out Speak up! by Rebecca Burgess. It’s a fantastic juvenile book about an autistic character finding her place and does a fantastic job showing through images what the character is feeling.

From an Autistic Librarian

thanks, Meghan! I will check it ou!

I would love to do that for you. I am autistic/adhd and I work 90% of the time with autistic individuals

I would get into a critique group and ask them. Good luck.