Keedie by Elle McNicoll

Title: Keedie

Author: Elle McNicoll

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Walker Books

Published: 1^st August 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 224

Price: $17.99

Synopsis: The highly anticipated prequel to the award-winning A KIND OF SPARK.

Before there was Addie, there was Keedie. Five years before the events of A Kind of Spark, Keedie is figuring out how to be her bold, brave self in a town that wants her to be quiet. Her twin sister Nina seems to care more about being popular, and Keedie knows her little sister Addie is more similar to her than her family knows.

When she starts standing up to people’s bullies for them, everyone wants her to pretend nothing is wrong with the way things are in Juniper. But firecracker Keedie wants things to change… and she wants things to be better for Addie. As she sets out to right wrongs and stand up for the truth, the sleepy town of Juniper is about to wake up and see that Keedie is one of a kind.

~*~

Thirteen-year-old Keedie Darrow lives in Juniper, a small village in Edinburgh. Keedie is autistic, and she’s navigating the tricky early years of teenagerhood as her twin sister, Nina, drifts further towards the popular kids, a group full of bullies who see any difference as a target, and Keedie has seen what their reign of terror has done. Keedie is brave and bold, but everyone wants her and her friends – Angel and Bonnie – who go to different schools – to be quiet. To fit in. But Keedie doesn’t want to do that. She wants to show her little sister Addie to shine and embrace who she is, because Keedie can see Addie is autistic, something her family refuses to see.

Keedie is strong. So strong, she decides it is time to do something about the bullies in school, and starts to stand up to people’s bullies for her, calling out what people say and do, and having a quiet word with people to try and bring a sense of justice into the world. Problem is, everyone wants to brush it all under the carpet, much like the real world. Keedie wants to right the wrongs she says, and make people realise that ignoring them doesn’t make the bad things go away. It just makes people bury their heads in the sand. Juniper is about to get a wake-up call from Keedie, one that they have needed for a long time.

Like many autistic people, Keedie lives in a world where she’s not understood by everyone around her. They want her to blend in, to be quiet and turn her head the other way when she sees injustices. She wants her little sister to shine and be who she is, not hide it away from everyone to make people comfortable. So Keedie masks to make people at school and in the village happy. Throughout the story, Keedie grapples with making people comfortable and wanting to be close to Nina again, but also a desire to be herself and not hide. She wants to show Addie that being herself is important, that she needs to embrace her interests and be who she is, rather than shrinking herself down to accommodate others. Keedie’s story illustrates how autistic people are seen as difficult, and the different ways society sees them, but also celebrates the community neurodivergent people have. Keedie is herself throughout the book unashamedly and without a second thought when it comes to standing up for people. But Keedie is just one autistic person – some of the ways she experiences it are similar to Addie, yet they’re also different in many ways.

Keedie’s story illustrates the difficulties of being autistic in a neurotypical world, where there are unwritten scripts to follow that everyone seems to have been born with or intrinsically know, and scripts that Keedie goes over to try and fit in – but now, she’s tired of it. In reading Keedie’s story, I felt it gave great insight into what it is to be autistic, and not fit in. She encapsulates what it means to be passionate and have a special interest, and to see autism in other people, and I loved that through Keedie, Bonnie, and Angel we got to see three different kinds of autism representation and how each character responded to their autism, and the support they were given or not given. I loved this book, a prequel to Addie’s story in A Kind of Spark. Both books give autistic girls a voice – which is important because girls are less likely to be diagnosed, so hearing and reading stories like this can help inform people and allow autistic girls to see themselves represented in literature beyond the damaging stereotypes that are so often used in media. Elle McNicoll’s books celebrate neurodiversity and being neurodiverse, giving autistic and neurodiverse people a character that they can relate to. Keedie is perfectly imperfect – she embraces who she is and everything she stands for, and like every character she has flaws, she has things about herself she may wish were different but knows she can’t change, so she has to work with them to do the right thing. This is what I felt made her so relatable, because she didn’t try to be perfect like Nina. She didn’t need to follow the invisible script that neurotypicals seem to be born with, as Keedie observes.

But most importantly is Keedie’s anti-bullying stance that she takes throughout the book, and does all she can to unmask the bullies in her town and school that people seem to accept because they’re not like Keedie. They follow the rules, and they don’t rock the boat. This is Keedie’s power – her advocacy for bullying victims that the school librarian supports amidst teachers who would rather not deal with it. This thread will also be relatable to everyone who may have witnessed or experienced bullying and wished they had the strength to stand up and say something. I hope Keedie will give people the strength to do this, to be themselves and not feel like they have to shrink away and be what everyone expects. This book lets autistic people shine – particularly autistic girls, and I think that is what makes it such a powerful book.