I wish I’d found this book when I was first diagnosed. Although this book covers a huge range of topics, perhaps a little too many as I found the last few chapters to be a bit difficult to get through and too wide reaching and not specific enough. The majority of this book was a wonderful, informative, and reflective read. 

I really enjoy the way this book is structured, it’s very autism friendly with key points that will be discussed in each chapter. There is rarely heavy walls of text, and there is lots of reflective and personal descriptions throughout which helped me to put context to the text. Specifically the way in which the author talks about sensory issues, and plans to tackle them, while thinking about all the different types of sensory input was so incredibly useful. I’ve highlighted and book marked huge chunks of this book to come back to and create personal sensory/meltdown/shutdown/regulation plans from. 

I do think the author wanted to touch a lot of bases, and make sure everything that an autistic person or family member reading this could possibly experience. But I found her strongest work to be in the first half of this book when it was very reflective and had a lot of personal context. The last chapters in particular about Therapy and Mental Health were very wide reaching and didn’t hold the same spark that the first half of the book had. 

However, I really enjoyed this book, and found the great majority of it extremely useful and reflective. I wish I’d found this book when I was first diagnosed as the information and methods to deal with sensory experiences, overwhelm, shutdowns, and the like were incredibly useful!