Spoonface Steinberg Book

To begin, I was fully prepared not to like this piece. I'm not usually fond of this sort of writing style, written with purposefully poor diction so as to be from the POV of an uneducated or mentally challenged person. However, Lee Hall has crafted this work extremely well and taken care to give the character a distinct voice which conveys her autism and young age, but in such a way that it doesn't become distracting. In this delicate balance, we fully understand the character and it actually accentuates how profound her observations and musings on life and death are.

Two of my favorite passages:

"you can't feel the end our touch the end-- 'cos there was really no ends to find-- that was the meaning there are no real ends-- only middles, and even if I was at the end I was still in the middle... so everything is the middle-- even if it was at the middle of an end-- it didn't matter because I'm in it." (pg 155)

"When you think about dying it is very hard to do-- it is to think about what is not-- to think about everything there is nothing -- to not be and never to be again -- it is even more than emptiness -- if you think of emptiness it is full of nothing and death is more than this-- death is even less than nothing... and that is the weird point-- not that there is even anything but there is not even nothing-- and that is death." (pg 157-8)