Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles's disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister Delia; Jorge, the gentle nonverbal giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center's pool who feels out of her depth; then there's Mike, Upward Bound's director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an impressive holiday show starring the center's sorely underestimated clients.
Not a good novel for a nonspeaking autistic person; it’s a good novel, period ... Flourishes of poetic grandness are relatively sparse in these pages. Brown is typically content with the careful accumulation of ordinary details and muted feelings that have fermented into a private liquor of determination ... A signature gentleness speaks through all these characters. Brown inhabits every one with an uncanny sensitivity to their hopes and anxieties.
Upward Bound is good. I recommend it. The novel takes the form of an interlocking set of stories about the clients and staff at a day-care center for adults with disabilities in Southern California. Its 12 chapters are written from the viewpoints of eight different characters. Their voices are engaging and distinct, and their efforts at communication—the tiny social cues they either catch or miss—are cataloged in careful detail. It’s as if the book were written to refute the classic notion that autistic people’s deficits result from a malfunctioning 'theory of mind.' The book is, if nothing else, a master class in making sense of mental states—a perspective-taking flex.
Upward Bound is at pains to emphasise the difference of its characters – the range of conditions and presentations that complicate this community of outcasts. No one person is alike or even necessarily on the same page, and so the book gives us multiple viewpoints ... Brown’s prose draws connections and pulls his figures into focus ... As for Brown, his story arc as a novelist is just getting started, and it’s hard to imagine a more vertiginous lift-off than this ... Upward Bound is also funny and moving and ringing with life; a book that embraces the difficulty and contradictions of its subject matter.
