The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Making good on the promise of his Way of the Jaguar (2000), Stork delivers a powerful tale populated by appealing (and decidedly unappealing) characters and rich in emotional nuance. In the end Marcelo keeps his feet amid strong emotional currents, makes the hard choices and even maps out a personal future that wasn’t at all clear earlier on. Vicious office intrigues, Marcelo’s long-standing fascination with religious thought and his discovery of a damning piece of suppressed evidence in a case involving his father’s biggest corporate client all lead to a series of short but deep heart-to-heart conversations about ethics, God’s will and other big questions. Comfortable with his limitations but still anxious, Marcelo strikes gold immediately when Jasmine, his supervisor in the Mail Room, turns out to be an uncommonly perceptive young woman-unlike Wendell, the sex-obsessed son of his father’s slimeball legal partner.

But it's a picture he finds in a file - a picture of a girl with half a face - that truly connects him with the real world: its suffering, its injustice, and what he can do to fight.In what turns out to be considerably more than just another tale told by an intelligent narrator with a spectrum disorder, 17-year-old Marcelo Sandoval gets a life-changing taste of the “real world” when he’s forced to take a summer job in his father’s law firm. He learns about competition and jealousy, anger and desire. to join 'the real world.'There Marcelo meets Jasmine, his beautiful and surprising coworker, and Wendell, the son of another partner in the firm.

But his father has never fully believed in the music or Marcelo's differences, and he challenges Marcelo to work in the mailroom of his law firm for the summer. Sometimes I perceive more of reality than others.Marcelo Sandoval hears music that nobody else can hear - part of an autism-like condition that no doctor has been able to identify.

The term 'cognitive disorder' implies there is something wrong with the way I think or the way I perceive reality. with a romance, and you have the beginnings of this story of a young man struggling with the world outside his head-and the woman who gets inside it.

Marcelo in the real world