Read aloud, or Middle education
Melody has Cerebral Palsy, and can't talk, but she is smart, and she has a lot to say and no words to use.
This book would be great for a read aloud for fourth graders or for casual reading for 5th - 12th graders. ( )

This book would be appropriate for middle school because of the length.
This book is about a young girl with cerebral palsy and a photographic memory as she learns to navigate school and longing to be noticed as just another student.
I would recommend this book in a classroom as a form of disability representation or to bring awareness to cerebral palsy.

Many people love love love this book, so I'm going to skip the praise for now (you can read plenty of it elsewhere) and go straight to criticism:

1. The phrase "untouched in my hands" really bothers me. If a snowflake is melting in your hands, you've touched it. This line was probably meant to sound poetic but comes off as a failed metaphor to me.

2. I worry this book is dated already. Do kids in the year 2010 say "tight" anymore? I think Draper is trying to make Melody sound like an average kid, but to me she sounds like an adult trying to sound like a kid. In fact, a lot of dialogue struck me as unrealistic (i.e. an adult's version of what she thinks modern kids sound like). I've never heard anyone say, "She is tripping," without droppin' the g. Now, I still say things are "the bomb," but I'm a lot older than the kids in this book. Other things that I think will date this book: MySpace, TiVo, and Nintendo Wii. (I've re-read sections of the book and I think it's Draper's overuse of exclamation points that makes her characters sound inauthentic and corny to me.)

3. It strikes me as unrealistic that Melody, with her super intelligence, couldn't communicate better using her low-tech talking board. If she's a perfect speller, couldn't she spell out "I love you" to her parents? Wouldn't they take the time to allow her to do that? Better yet, wouldn't her parents seek out adaptive technology so they could communicate better with their child?

4. The villains in this story (Molly and Claire, the bad teachers, and the stupid psychologist that gives Melody her initial intelligence test) are totally one-dimensional. I get annoyed when authors create completely flat villains.

5. I thought the near-tragedy thrown in at the end of the book didn't really contribute to the story. It was a weird way to end the book, like the author wanted to crank up the melodrama in the end and she overdid it.

6. This is a personal issue: I went to elementary school with a boy who had CP and he spent only part of each day away from the rest of our class. If this was the case in the 1980s, it's hard for me to believe that educators in the 21st Century have regressed into the situation Melody finds herself in. I loved the first chapter of this book, but I grew more and more skeptical as it went on. (Update: Many people have told me in the comments that it *is* common for children with disabilities to be completely segregated from the rest of the school. Instead of removing this criticism, I will leave it because it shows that what strikes one reader as unrealistic can be all too realistic for another reader. Thanks, commenters.)

To conclude my review I want to say: I'm not heartless! I think this story has the potential to really spark empathy. But this book had a lot of shortcomings and I'm not one to ignore them just because the subject matter is important. I believe this could have been a much better book. (When I first reviewed this book it had Newbery buzz and in my opinion it's not Newbery caliber.)

Update: I just read something by the author [a:Patrick Ness|370361|Patrick Ness|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1589369436p2/370361.jpg] on School Library Journal's Battle of the Books 2014. He said there are too many books he calls CBAITS, which stands for Crappy Books About Important Things. I was like, yes! I wouldn't go so far as to call Out of My Mind a crappy book, but I do think its important subject matter made some reviewers forgive or ignore its literary flaws.

Another update: I see that Disney is making this into a movie, so I'll probably have a fresh crop of commenters mad at me for this negative review. To those who love this book: I'm glad you love this book! It's ok for you to love it and for me to dislike it. We can still be friends. ( )

I probably would have rated this 3 stars through most of the book, but a really good, unexpected ending bumped it up a star!

Kids should be required to read this in school, to learn compassion for the disabled! ( )

Would have been a 5 if not for a sort of ridiculous end game to create tension. No teacher would have done what the one in this book did. ( )