un/Fair

When the doctor said my son Aran was autistic, my world turned upside-down.  I spent
years playing special games with him to help him understand the world better.  But in the process, I learned to understand him.  While I struggled to pull him into our world, he quietly pulled me into his.  This book came out of that.

People always ask authors–including me–why I got a certain scene on the cover or why I didn’t put a particular character on the front.  The truth is, authors almost never draw the book covers.  We get a picture of it by email, and it’s always a surprise, like getting an early birthday present.  Sometimes the present is a wool sweater you want to wad into a ball and stuff under the bed.  Sometimes the present is a toy you didn’t know you wanted until you got it.  The cover for un/FAIR was the latter.  Ryan looks very much like I imagined him in my head, and the salamanders creeping down the top make it clear this isn’t a happy fairy book.  The artist even snuck in a reference to the Fibonacci sequence!  I loved getting this one.


It’s difficult enough to live in the neighborhood “freakazoid” house.  It’s even more difficult when you’re autistic and neither your family nor best friend really understands you.  So when Ryan November wakes up on his eleventh birthday with the unexpected ability to see the future, he braces himself for trouble.  But even his newfound power doesn’t anticipate that the fair folk–undines, salamanders, gnomes, and sylphs–want him dead, dead, dead.  Ryan races to defend himself and his family against unrelenting danger from the fairy realm so he can uncover the truth about his family history–and himself.  Except as Ryan’s power grows, the more enticing the fairy realm becomes, forcing him to choose between order and chaos, power and family.  And for an autistic boy, such choices are never cut and dry.

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