DANCING WITH NO SHOES

David Hardy is shocked when he hears that his former roommate killed himself. He met Ronnie Davenport the previous year at Connections, a two-week residential program in Boston for mentally and physically challenged adolescents. David, who has a type of cerebral palsy known as spastic quadriplegia, is convinced Ronnie’s fatal overdose was more likely an accident or cold-blooded murder. A TV reporter who thinks the same thing, and even ties Ronnie’s death to another suspicious overdose, is more than enough incentive for David to investigate. Mere weeks after his friend’s funeral, he packs his bags for another summer at Connections, which is held inside the same children’s hospital where David was born. Luckily, he gets support from this year’s roommate, Roberto “Buzz” Rodriguez, and an unexpected romantic interest, Ariadne “Ari” Pratt. Both promise David to stay mum with regard to his snooping. With his power wheelchair and his speech-synthesizing computer, David makes the rounds at the hospital and interrogates some of the doctors with access to Ronnie’s meds. Any one of them may have somehow messed with his prescribed drugs, which surely means that something diabolical is afoot. David surmises he’s on the right track when he’s fairly certain that someone tries taking him out in the same devious fashion. While David undoubtedly hopes that his relationship with Ari blossoms into a bona-fide romance, his priority is finding justice for his dead friend.   

Lindgren’s book favors characters’ personal stories over the potential murder mystery. David is a full-bodied hero teeming with complexities; he yearns for independence but knows he still needs assistance with ostensibly simple acts like getting dressed. He’s instantly likable—just a regular guy in a wheelchair who falls in love at lightning speed and whose pranks don’t always work. Throughout the novel, David is in the company of youngsters with disabilities, as there are 12 “campers” at Connections. While several of them have only a few appearances and consequently fade into the background, the tale spotlights others. Most noticeably, there’s Ari, who suffered a traumatic brain injury from a car accident; Buzz, who has ADHD and dyslexia; and good-humored computer hacker Zelda Blumberg, who has an autism spectrum disorder as well as a romantic entanglement with Buzz. But the mystery side of things is less absorbing. David wisely questions numerous individuals, including members of Ronnie’s family. But he’s doing this primarily on his gut feeling, as he has no evidence and no motive to fuel his investigation. At one point, he deems a man a likely suspect because he’s “kind of full of himself.” On the other hand, no one stands out as a killer, and Ronnie’s death may not even be murder—a possibility that occasionally pops up in David’s ever-evolving theory. Although the author’s unadorned prose keeps descriptions at a minimum, the abundant dialogue is lively and chock-full of delightfully censored insults (“Can’t you two shut the f-word up?”).