No Book But the World by Leah Hager Cohen

There are many messages to be found in the midst of this book.   The book is about a family of four.  Neel and June are the parents and they live in a compound in the woods with five cottages that Neel uses as a private school to practice his hypotheses of early-childhood education. The school is a surprising success, but when June gives birth to two children, Neel shuts it down to work out his theories on his offspring. Of course, the more he chides June for teaching their children to read, sing, play instruments and do math, the more he himself instructs them, which leaves them damages and vulnerable.

The two children are Ava, who tells most of the story, and Fred, two years younger and suffering from an autism-spectrum disorder that leave him mute and sucking his thumb well into adulthood.  If he were enrolled in the public school system, he’d be evaluated but instead he is left to the devices of Ava and a girl who's family moves into the compound who perpetrates mean girl games upon Fred that he comes to see as normal play, much to his undoing.

The novel moves on two tracks. As it opens, Ava is happily married, but Fred is a vagrant, and he’s been arrested in connection with the death of a 12-year-old boy. Ava hasn’t seen him in two years, but she journeys to see what she can do for him.  Still with almost no words to use, Fred has been given over to handyman/drug dealer Dave and his pal Umberto, who is all mindless evil (and will appear in a sequel.  Families who live with a challenged child know what it is to be awake at night, tormented by what will happen when they die and their loved one is left alone. That’s what this novel is about.