Susan Vaught’s extraordinary and insightful book Freaks Like Us transports readers into a world filtered through the main character’s, Jason’s, eyes as his best friend, Sunshine, disappears, leaving everyone with only 24 hours to find and capture the person responsible and get back Sunshine. A series of twist and turns leaves the characters in a highly suspenseful situation. To make matters works, Jason is schizophrenic, or as he puts it, an alphabet- a person with a mental disability. And everyone thinks he hurt Sunshine. The reader is dragged into the constant struggle of Jason as he tries to find Sunshine, all while trying to convince everyone of his innocence. Besides being an excellent narrative that transports the reader, it also teaches
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“‘ I didn’t hurt Sunshine.’ I tell Dad, who doesn’t react...I can’t stop staring at Dad and now I’m wanting to cry and I’m kind of wishing he was possessed by mean trees because maybe that would be better than realizing he thinks I might have done something awful to somebody else- and not just somebody else, but Sunshine, for God’s sake….’I know you’d never hurt her on purpose’ he says, trying to get closer to me. ‘On purpose? I’d never do it at all.’ I want him to hear me. I want him to agree with me. He has to agree with me.” Through these sentences, Jason experienced his first deep emotional rift with a bias as his own father think she could have done it, despite no evidence to swing either for or against Jason at all. He let the fact that Jason thinks differently get in the way of his own opinion about his son, going from passionate that Jason didn’t hurt Sunshine to convicting him of doing, whether it was intentional or not. It’s with this too, that the author displays just how desperate jason is to convince his father that he is wrong, that he would never do something like this, proving how just emotionally scarring it is for Jason to understand his own father thinks he killed or hurt another person- his best friend no
“‘ I didn’t hurt Sunshine.’ I tell Dad, who doesn’t react...I can’t stop staring at Dad and now I’m wanting to cry and I’m kind of wishing he was possessed by mean trees because maybe that would be better than realizing he thinks I might have done something awful to somebody else- and not just somebody else, but Sunshine, for God’s sake….’I know you’d never hurt her on purpose’ he says, trying to get closer to me. ‘On purpose? I’d never do it at all.’ I want him to hear me. I want him to agree with me. He has to agree with me.” Through these sentences, Jason experienced his first deep emotional rift with a bias as his own father think she could have done it, despite no evidence to swing either for or against Jason at all. He let the fact that Jason thinks differently get in the way of his own opinion about his son, going from passionate that Jason didn’t hurt Sunshine to convicting him of doing, whether it was intentional or not. It’s with this too, that the author displays just how desperate jason is to convince his father that he is wrong, that he would never do something like this, proving how just emotionally scarring it is for Jason to understand his own father thinks he killed or hurt another person- his best friend no