Autism on my end of the spectrum is like ADHD times a thousand. It’s nearly impossible for me to untangle the many channels in my brain so that I can stay on a single station.
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Table of Contents
Why Upward Bound?
I first heard about Upward Bound through a bookshop.org newsletter at the very end of March. It is a debut novel written by a nonspeaking autistic person that is about the experience of others like him in a adult day care center in Los Angeles. I thought it was an interesting premise and the perspective is one I want to read more from.
I have been on the lookout for books with autism spectrum representation every since I was diagnosed as being on the spectrum. I can’t recall the last time where a character in a book I read was explicitly autistic as opposed to having a lot of autistic coded traits. I mentioned in my review of the latest Heather Fawcett book that the main character is very autistic coded, however that is my reading – the book never states that explicitly.
I placed a library hold for the book when I heard about it and received my hold at the tail end of April 2026. This is a debut novel so this is my first time reading anything by Woody Brown. Blurbs on front and back of the edition I read by – Mona Simpson, Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Angie Kim, Rivka Galchen, Caoilinn Hughes.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
Upward Bound is a literary fiction novel that is a group character study of various people in the titular Upward Bound adult daycare center. This includes the staff and the clients who are all disabled adults of various kinds – a lot of them non-verbal autistic but there’s also verbal and physically disabled adults in this group.
There are a few different POV characters here, one from the main character Walter who gets a first person POV in a narration like style. We also get a POV from Tom, a non-verbal adult with cerebral palsy. Ann, a new staffer for the summer who acts as a lifeguard. Carlos, another staffer who is friendly with the Jorge the non-verbal gentle giant. Mariana, Carlos’ sister. Dave, the dictatorial “principal” of the center. Andy, another staffer. And lastly Avery, a Target cashier who observes these people come into the store she works in.
Normally, this many character POVs is something I wouldn’t be a fan of but in this case I think it works just fine. It works here because it is not a long book (208 pages) and a lot of the character perspectives involve inner monologues, observations from the person about something happening to or around them. The book also has a small scope, it mostly takes place in one location with brief detours into the Target store and a flashback in the past to a camping event.
The increased interiority also works in this books favour – a lot of the disabled characters in the book are non-verbal so they don’t have “normal” conversations with other characters so their inner monologues serves us their character development. I found these inner monologue sections to be well done and the disabled characters developed with a fair amount of nuance and care.
Thematically, I think the book does a good job of presenting the experiences of this specific subset of disabled people through a lens that we don’t often see in media. Things like the interactions between developmentally disabled people and their caregivers is often written about and shown from the perspective of the caregivers and not the ones receiving said care so it was eye-opening to get a glimpse of what the other side is thinking and feeling.
That brings be to one of two major criticisms I have about the Upward Bound. The first is the use of the R slur by non-disabled characters in this book, namely staffers like Ann, Carlos, and Andy. These characters will casually use the R slur to describe their clients in their inner monologue. At no point in the book does it interrogate the use of that particular word and these characters don’t seem to be self aware enough to do it themselves.
My problem with this is that I don’t see a good reason for Woody Brown to have these characters use that particular word. It doesn’t seem to serve as useful tool for character development as these characters are reasonably complicated and nuanced characters without adding that word into the mix. It also doesn’t seem to serve as a well thought out critique of the way non-disabled people treat disabled people, the rest of the book does that with the wider setting and the way the various characters interact. So, what was the point of it?
I get that this book is supposed to be a “realistic” depiction of how non-disabled people might treat and/or think about disabled people but in my opinion the book did not need to make use of this slur to drive the point home. It felt like a sledgehammer, it is not subtle and it felt like getting a flashbang to my face every time. It felt like careless shorthand for a topic that needed deeper interrogation than characters just casually throwing slurs around.
The second criticism I have is about the ending of this book. I usually refrain from spoilers in my book reviews but in this particular case I need to spoil the ending of the book to explain exactly why I think it was poorly done. So this next spoiler section will be under one sub-heading. If you don’t want to read spoilers, skip to the next heading. You have been warned.
On the Ending, Spoilers Ahead!
Upward Bound‘s ending is a classic case of not sticking the landing. So the ending: Carlos, one of the staffers trying to deescalate a situation where Jorge (the non-verbal gentle giant) has run out of the center’s building and across to the small park across the street. There he is harassed by a couple police officers, Jorge is very agitated by this and Carlos tries to intervene only to have one of the police officers pull his gun out and shoot Carlos who then dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Now there are two problems with this. First, it is a completely unnecessary set of events that serves to make the ending feel abrupt and rushed. I don’t know why this was written the way it was. If Woody Brown was trying to demonstrate police violence against disabled people, it could have been done without anybody being murdered.
Second, Carlos is one of two people of colour in this book, the other being his sister Mariana. As far as I can tell, it is not explicitly stated that Carlos is a brown person but it is definitely implied that he is. So to recap – a brown person is murdered by the police while trying to deescalate a situation involving a disabled person and the takeaway from this is…what exactly?
Like with the first problem, I don’t see the point of this. Right before this incident, Carlos as a character was developed further – he got a POV of his own and his special relationship with Jorge was explained more deeply. It was all very heartwarming. Then the book literally kills the relationship with this rather haphazard set of events. I think if the book wanted to explore the topic of police brutality in relation to disabled people, it could have done so in a way where a brown person did not end up paying the ultimate price for the lesson.
As far as I can tell, the only purpose of this ending was to provide a reason for the main character’s (Walter) mother to pull him out of the center and become his full-time caregiver which then concludes the story. I don’t think it was necessary to kill off a character to do this, let alone one of the two POC characters in your story. Sloppily done.
Concluding Thoughts
Ultimately I ended up feeling disappointed after I finished Upward Bound. I thought there was some interesting character work done from a perspective we very rarely get in media and some of the themes it tackled were handled with nuance and care. However, the book’s ending and its casual use of a certain slur meant that my negative feelings about the book overshadow any positives.
I am not entirely opposed to reading future books from Woody Brown but I would have to be convinced that any such book does a better job of certain topics and takes more care with its ending. As far as debuts I have read this year are concerned, this is in contention with The Book of Fallen Leaves as the worst of them and I think that latter one wins out as this wasn’t a slog to get through.
That’s all from me. See y’all in the next one.
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