As Shawn McDaniel explains it, "My life's one of those good news-bad news jokes. Like, 'I've got some good news and some bad news-which do you wanna hear first?'" The good news is that he lives with his family in Seattle, a very cool place to be. He even likes the rain. He's the youngest of three kids, and he has this weird gift or power where he can remember everything he hears, perfectly, with total recall. TV commercials, melodies, dialogue from movies, and even overhead conversations-Shawn remembers everything, including every voice he hears.

The bad news is that he is, as he calls it, a "total retardate." According to the rest of the world, including his family, he's dumb as a fence post, with a mental age of three months, because he has cerebral palsy and can't control a single muscle in his body. He can't talk or even blink his eyes in response; he just sits there and drools in his wheelchair. What no one realizes is that he's actually brilliant, or as he calls himself, "a secret genius." He's picked up reading, and his main teachers in life are the TV, radio, listening to his family, and catching glimpses of words on pages. His parents are divorced, or, as he says of his father, " . . . he divorced me. He couldn't handle my condition so he had to leave."

His mom talks to him in baby talk. He'd love to be able to say to her, "Geez, Mom, I'm 14 friggin' years old." But he can't. The final bad-news punch line? He's pretty sure his dad, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, is planning to kill him, to put him out of his misery. And Shawn doesn't want to be dead.

The author has first-hand knowledge of CP. His son has it and is much like Shawn on the outside. Who knows what really goes on in the head of a child like this? The winner of a Michael L. Printz Honor in 1999, this slim, explosive story will change the way readers think about disabilities, catastrophic illnesses, and what goes on in anyone else's head.

THEMES: CEREBRAL PALSY. FATHERS AND SONS. PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES. EUTHANASIA.