Michael Cathcart

At least Don is working on that assumption.

Don from Book One has always rejected labels, but he has been claimed by the autistic community where political correctness in this book is in full sail.

We must say a person has autism, we're told, not say that a person is autistic.

That is, until we meet an autistic person named Liz, who brands the rest of the world as neurotypical and insists that she is autistic in the same way that she is a lesbian.

You don't have lesbianism.

You don't have autism.

You have a cold, but they pass.

She's autistic.

She's a lesbian.

She's very defiant about that.

All of this draws our attention to the way in which, on the one hand, care and consideration needs to be used when we talk about other people.

But it also calls into question the judgmental rectitude of the moral gatekeepers.

The book has no time at all for those moral guardians who ridicule and belittle strangers on social media in the name of upholding the rights of their own clan.

The book is ultimately about what it means to be a man.

How can Hudson grow up to be a socially active male in a world where guys like Gary, an ideologically pious homeopath, ridicules science in public and tyrannises his family in private?

Gary is no kind of man at all, it turns out.

How can a teenage boy who is not neurotypical grow up to be a man when he's besieged by ideologies and political agendas on all sides?

This is not a laugh-out-loud book like Rosie's One and Two.

The comedy's still there, but there is a philosophical seriousness to this one which brings the whole issue much closer to home.

I liked it very much and I recommend it.