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A wondrous, deeply affecting portrait of the interlocking lives at an adult day care center in Southern California, depicting an often overlooked community with extraordinary wit and grace—by a major new literary voice hailed as a "groundbreaking debut novelist" (Publishers Weekly)
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 Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking 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 Dave, Upward Bound's director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center's irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.
In Upward Bound, Woody Brown has created an indelible, authentic, and profoundly moving group portrait of autism and other disabilities, all illuminated by his empathy, sly sense of humor, and enormous gifts as a novelist. With remarkable sophistication, insight, and creativity, Brown depicts a community too-often invisible in literature and society. Filled with characters you won't soon forget, Upward Bound will inspire and touch you, teaching you as much about yourself as the tender, miraculous world behind the center's doors.
"Brown's compassionate debut delves with great insight into the lives and minds of the disabled residents of an adult day care center in Southern California. Each chapter tells a client or staff member's story, and together they reveal a hidden world of the disenfranchised...This captivating work illuminates a world too often ignored." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Brown—who was the first nonspeaking autistic graduate of UCLA—offers a vanishingly rare glimpse of the interiority of nonverbal autistic adults and a critique of the well-meaning but often misguided able-bodied people in their orbits...Full of humor and charm...a debut novel that truly breaks new ground." —Kirkus Reviews
"The residents and staff of an underfunded adult care center in Los Angeles form the core of Brown's singular debut novel...Brown's sly sense of humor and ability to inhabit, without condescension, the experiences of those often marginalized, including the bumbling but well-intentioned caregivers, make the novel both quietly surprising and gently enlightening." —Booklist
"Great characters, great pace, great story—reading Upward Bound is a complicated joy." —Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize–winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
"Implosive and wonderfully inspirational, Upward Bound is acutely aware that be it indigo, autism, social class, or the gamma ray, everything and everyone is on the spectrum." —Paul Beatty, Booker Prize–winning author of The Sellout
This information about Upward Bound was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
In 2022, Woody Brown became the first autistic nonspeaking graduate of UCLA, where he received the English Department's top writing honors. Brown completed his MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University in 2024. He lives in Los Angeles and is working on a new novel.
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