The Speed of Dark - Elizabeth Moon

My friend Sheryn was reading this, and looked interesting, so I picked it up. The basic premise is that a man with autism (Lou) is living in the near future where an experimental procedure has become available to "cure" him.

I really liked this book, it was carefully considered, took some risks, well written, and with a great ending. Unfortunately, the author wrote another two chapters after that perfect ending.


[Spoiler ahead:]
In the end, Lou decides to take the treatment. He cleans out his office at work, prepares his home for an extended absence, and ends with a perfect line. That's where the book should have stopped... Moon, however, gives us a chapter to summarize his progress in treatment, as well as an epilogue of how much better he is now. I thought the book would have been better if she had left that unknown. It was a real disappointment, because the rest of the book dealt fearlessly with leaving things unknown, and the unknown was really a major theme of this book. So to have the results spelled out for us, was worse than anticlimactic, it did a disservice to the rest of the book.

My quote from this book is long:

"I do not think G-d makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.
G-d is supposed to be the good parent [...] G-d would not make things harder than they are."