He is on the autism spectrum, and he was upset because the handle wasn’t moving smoothly (Abelard says it needed oil). In the office, Lily discovers that Abelard was the one on the other side of the wall moving the door handle. She cannot resist messing with the moving shiny abject, and the wall (it’s one of those folding temporary walls) breaks. Lily is in class one day when she notices that the handle of the divider that separates her classroom from the adjacent classroom is moving. At the same time, I loved this book and wanted to read it over and over again because the characters are so well done. I’ve been told by teachers (recently) that grades aren’t everything, but at one point when Lily got a bad grade I put my head in my hands and cried. I have never been more worried about a character – maybe because I’m the mom of a teenage girl so I’m primed to worry, maybe because my anxiety has been sky high lately, or maybe just because Lily’s voice is so powerful that it’s impossible not to feel that she’s real and that her disasters have meaning. Lily is a teenager who has very severe ADHD.

This book is written from the point of view of Lily, and is told in first-person, past tense. I loved this book but fair warning, I have never been so stressed out by reading a novel in my life. Theme: Forced Proximity (stranded, safehouse, etc)

The love letters of abelard and lily