A Study Guide for Nora Raleigh Baskin's "Anything But Typical"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nora Raleigh Baskin's "Anything But Typical," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818582

Book preview

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Anything but Typical

Nora Raleigh Baskin

2009

Introduction

Nora Raleigh Baskin's sixth novel, Anything but Typical, published in 2009, is narrated by Jason Blake, a twelve-year-old boy with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. The narrative takes the reader inside Jason's mind as he tries to explain what life is like for him in a language that neurotypicals—that is, people without autism—can understand. The stream-of-consciousness style conveys the way Jason's thought processes work, allowing the average reader to relate to his experiences on some levels. Meanwhile, Jason's obsession with writing fictional short stories for an online writing community gives him an outlet to work through some of his conflicts and provides parallels for his own experiences. In the growing field of disability studies and among the recent surge in young-adult disability fiction, Anything but Typical shines.

Author Biography

Baskin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 18, 1961, and spent her childhood in rural upstate New York. Her mother, Arlene Mayerson, died when she was three and a half years old. Her father, Henry P. Raleigh Jr., is an artist and painter, as was his father, the well-known illustrator Henry P. Raleigh Sr. Baskin wrote her first poem in the fifth grade, and by the sixth grade she knew she wanted to be a writer.

Baskin graduated from the State University of New York at Purchase with a degree in literature in 1983. She worked as a waitress, teacher, and homemaker before her first book, What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows, was published in 2001. Like much of Baskin's work, it draws inspiration from her own life story. Most everything I write, Baskin says on her web page, whether it is a novel or an essay or a short story is very much a part of my life. The book is based on Baskin's experiences growing up without a mother, and it resulted in Baskin's being chosen as a Publishers Weekly Flying Start winner. Baskin started out writing short stories for adult readers, but many of her characters were children. She wrote her first children's story for her son's second-grade class, and it was such a success that she decided to focus on fiction for younger readers. In the early 2010s, she was living in Weston, Connecticut, with her husband and two sons, Ben and Sam, who are also writers.

Anything but Typical won, in the middle-school category, the 2010 Schneider Family Book Award, which honors an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences, according to the American Library Association website.

Plot Summary

Anything but Typical is told from the first-person point of view of twelve-year-old Jason