Good Different

by Meg Eden Kuyatt

Overview

A Schneider Family Book Award Honor Book

An extraordinary novel-in-verse for fans of Starfish and A Kind of Spark about a neurodivergent girl who comes to understand and celebrate her difference.

Selah knows her rules for being normal.

She always, always sticks to them. This means keeping her feelings locked tightly inside, despite the way they build up inside her as each school day goes on, so that she has to run to the bathroom and hide in the stall until she can calm down. So that she has to tear off her normal-person mask the second she gets home from school, and listen to her favorite pop song on repeat, trying to recharge. Selah feels like a dragon stuck in a world of humans, but she knows how to hide it.

Until the day she explodes and hits a fellow student.

Selah's friends pull away from her, her school threatens expulsion, and her comfortable, familiar world starts to crumble.

But as Selah starts to figure out more about who she is, she comes to understand that different doesn’t mean damaged. Can she get her school to understand that, too, before it’s too late?

This is a moving and unputdownable story about learning to celebrate the things that make us different. Good Different is the perfect next read for fans of Counting by 7s or Jasmine Warga.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781338816105
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	28,207
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Meg Eden Kuyatt is a neurodivergent author and college-level creative writing instructor. She is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee, and the author of poetry books. When she isn’t writing, she’s probably playing Fire Emblem. If she could be a Pokémon, she’d be Charizard. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Instagram at @meden_author.

Read an Excerpt

I ran,

locked myself

in one of the changing stalls.

Mom banged on the door

but I balled up on the dirty

tile floor

and cried

and hyperventilated

till my head stopped spinning

and my eyes dried

enough for me to see.

But when I calmed down,

Mom said,

“Selah Godfrey,

never ever cry

in the middle of a store.

Always hold it in

till you make it back to the car.”

That became

the first rule

for my list

on how to be

a Normal person.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/20/2023

In Kuyatt’s heartfelt debut, free verse poems explore middle school changes via the first-person viewpoint of an autistic 12-year-old. Selah Godfrey has always liked rules-oriented Pebblecreek Academy, where she knows exactly “what I’m/ supposed to do.” But when she enters seventh grade, everything’s different. Amid the crowded hallways, loud cafeteria, and itchy new uniforms, Selah’s rules for “Being a ‘Normal’ Person” include resisting the urge to talk about dragons, remaining on her “Best Behavior,” and otherwise masking until she can calm herself in the bathroom. When a classmate braids her hair without asking, and Selah’s reaction causes a bloody nose, Selah is regarded as a social pariah and threatened with expulsion. Isolated from her peers, she takes the advice of her beloved, similarly wired grandfather and starts to write in a notebook, further finding her voice through a kind English teacher’s poetry assignment. Kuyatt, who is autistic, uses candid lines to present Selah’s story, conveying her mother’s well-intentioned denial of Selah’s needs, and Selah’s own experiences, self-knowledge, and eventual self-advocacy. Selah is white. An author’s note and resources conclude. Ages 8–12. Agent: Lauren Spieller, TriadaUS. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Relatable, profound and beautifully heartfelt. I loved it.” — Elle McNicoll, author of the Schneider Family Book Award Honor-winning A Kind of Spark

From the Publisher

2023-02-08
An autistic artist just wants to survive seventh grade.

Selah, a White girl, is a “good kid,” praised for her schoolwork—but inside, she’s a “dragon.” She can’t abide noise, smells, or touches, and her mother has been extremely clear about hiding her differences in public. But her “normal-person mask” is fraying. When Selah is praised for getting an A on a test and there is loud applause, she thinks, “I want to crawl / under my desk.” Eventually, Selah has a violent outburst: Now classmates and teachers treat her like a wild animal. In her notebook, Selah writes free verse about being a dragon—a metaphor for all her neurodivergent frustration with social norms. She worries that she shouldn’t share her poetry (“My feelings are loud. Rude. / BIG. Sometimes / angry. Are those OK in poems?”), but the verses ultimately allow her to share her scary feelings. It’s a revelation when she finds fellow neurodivergent geeks at FantasyCon. Happy, married adults use earplugs and sensory tools, wear color-coded communication bracelets, and speak calmly and without shame about their autism. Can these tools help when educators at her private school are hostile to autistic kids’ needs? Can they help when even her neurodivergent mother doesn’t want to recognize that Selah isn’t “normal”? Through her poems, Selah believably mends her family and starts a movement in her school, showing readers ways that “different” can be wonderful.

Short free-verse vignettes beautifully evoke despair, loneliness—and determination. (author’s note, resources) (Verse fiction. 9-12)

Kirkus Reviews