[Spoiler alert]
I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I won't go into detail; the spoiler I'm going to share is that the protagonist, a middle-aged male writer, makes the mental observation about the title character, "Asperger's syndrome...or something like that. A talent for seeing patterns and understanding abstract reasoning where other people perceive only white noise." He reaches this conclusion after discovering that the girl, Lisbeth, has an eidetic memory and can almost immediately figure out any mechanical or technical system. A person with a lot of knowledge about ASDs can see a lot of typically ASD characteristics in Lisbeth's character, although she has other characteristics that contradict ASD symptoms. But since she's a fictional character, it's not really worth splitting hairs.
The thing on my mind this morning is another defining element of Lisbeth's character: she is the victim of horrific sexual abuse propogated by men in positions of direct legal power over her. And she does not report the crimes these men commit. Any humane reader will be disturbed by the situations, and the scenes in the book are brutal.
But I am additionally disturbed by the novel because I worry about my children, who cannot speak for themselves, falling prey to people like that, and the older they get, the more I worry. Even though I have total confidence in the people caring for them now, I won't always be able to control things. This local story, which was uncovered recently, really got under my skin, and I've been worrying more ever since I read it.
I wish I had an upbeat note with which to end this post, but I don't.
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