TITLE: A Rock and a Hard Place.
AUTHOR: Sutcliffe
SUBJECT AREA: Autism-Fiction
PUBLISHER: Autism Asperger Publishing Co.
PUBLICATION DATE: 2006
NUMBER OF PAGES: 363

Raising a child with autism is extremely difficult for most parents, but raising a child who is very severely affected, with many sensory difficulties combined with a lack of supports and a lack of understanding on the part of the school and the community, is ten times more difficult and this is made apparent to the reader of this very honest novel A Rock and a Hard Place, the story of a mother in England with three children, one of whom has severe autism.

Hollie, the child in question, had been in a private school but that wasn’t meeting her needs and she was exhibiting challenging behavior as a result. This situation created difficulties not only for Lucy Roseman, Hollie’s mother, but for her husband Simon and their two other children as well. Sutcliffe pulls no punches in describing how autism can affect the whole family, not just the affected individual.

Lucy tries to have her daughter admitted to another school, but it doesn’t work out, so she meets with a young male attorney who helps her file for a Due Process hearing. The author weaves in Lucy’s emotions, her relationships with her other children and how these have been affected by Hollie’s difficulties and the lack of available supports. She also reveals her attraction to the lawyer that she consults about the hearing, as well as the strains on her marriage to Simon, an aloof, yet gentle and loving person. The author deftly interweaves the complex strands of raising a child on the severe end of the Spectrum, her relationship with her husband, her affair with Joel the attorney, and her relationships with people in her social circle. This is set against the backdrop of the impending Due Process Hearing. The description of the hearing should prove helpful to parents who want to know more about the process.

The author gives an honest portrayal of raising a child with autism when the supports are few and far between, but when she describes Hollie’s challenging behavior, she doesn’t go into the sensory and communicative needs that Hollie is trying to express, when engaging in such behavior and the reader is not given the opportunity to see the behavior in context and what function it may be serving, as a result.

The author does an excellent job of exploring the sheer complexity of being a mother who has to raise two other children beside Hollie, one of whom is showing some possible signs of ASD herself. This could be seen as a realistic portrayal of what it’s like to parent a child so severely affected by autism, but the author emphasizes the negative aspects of autism, and what the reader sees is a child who is almost constantly displaying challenging behavior. The author doesn’t explore the possible sensory and communicative reasons behind the behavior as well, so the reader is left with the image of a child behaving badly. This is a shame, in an otherwise well-written novel.