Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman

Trueman, Terry. (2000). Stuck in neutral. New York: HarperCollins Children’s Books. ISBN 978-0064472135

Fourteen year-old Shawn McDaniel sees and hears perfectly well. He understands when people say “hello” and “how’s it going?” He has a remarkable memory for sounds and events. He even knows how to read, thanks to his sister’s passion for playing special education teacher as a child. The problem is… nobody knows this! Almost everyone thinks that Shawn is a “retard.” Those are his words, not mine. I’ll let him clarify: “Not a ‘retard’ like you might use the word to tease a friend who just said or did something stupid. I mean a real retard. Real in the same way that total means total. As in total retard: Everybody who knows me, everybody who sees me, everybody, anybody who even gets near me would tell you I’m dumb as a rock” (4). Shawn can’t talk, walk, or feed himself. He can’t ask to go to the bathroom or cheer on his favorite sports team. He can’t throw teenage temper tantrums or tell his parents that he loves the wonder and freedom of his grand mal seizures. He literally can’t move a muscle. Shawn has cerebral palsy.

Diagnosed with an I.Q. of 1.2, the equivalent of a 3 to 4 month old, Shawn lives in a silent world. His parents divorced when he was four years old because his father couldn’t cope with his son’s condition. After appearing on countless talkshows to discuss winning a Pulitzer for a story-poem he wrote about Shawn, Sydney E. McDaniel, Shawn’s dad, decides to interview a man from prison who killed his mentally handicapped toddler. The man claimed that it had to be done to end his son’s suffering. Convinced his father secretly wants to commit the same crime, Shawn silently screams for help, but will he ever be heard?

Thoughtfully written in the first person from the private thoughts of Shawn McDaniel, Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman is an invitation into an otherwise deathly silent world. The sympathetic reader can feel, see, hear, and understand everything that Shawn can. At times, he is nothing but a regular, raunchy fourteen-year-old: “I love it when Becky works with me, especially when she wears a low-cut top and has to bend over to load and unload me from this special standing contraption they put me in a couple hours every day. Her breasts are perfect: round and smooth and big.” Other times, Shawn is exceptional, and pain and fear seep through the cracks in his adolescent “voice”: “I wonder what it would be like to have a girlfriend. I even wonder what it would be like to love someone else more than I love my mom.” Trueman exposes Shawn for the emotional, sensitive human being that he is and not just another statistic in the mental health world.

The beauty of this book lies in the behind-the-author story. Terry Trueman is the father of a son named Sheehan with cerebral palsy. While Shawn is a character of fiction, his world is modeled off of the real life and presumed genius behind the mask of developmental disability that Trueman experiences every day with his son. Stuck in Neutral is both a social commentary and an inspiring story that isn’t colored black or white. Instead, it’s painted gray and shelved among novels that span both fiction and nonfiction. Further, Trueman uses his book as a vehicle to challenge stereotypes and touch upon the hardships of disability, as well as explore the meaning of unconditional love (and acceptance). Thus, Trueman struggles to reposition bricks between the walls of literary genres and surprisingly creates an entirely reinvented definition of the multicultural genre.