Title: All the Noise at Once
Author: DeAndra Davis
Genres: Contemporary
Pages: 380
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Review Copy: ARC by publisher
Availability: Available Now
Summary: All Aiden has ever wanted to do was play football just like his star quarterback brother, Brandon. An overstimulation meltdown gets in the way of Aiden making the team during summer tryouts, but when the school year starts and a spot unexpectedly needs to be filled, he finally gets a chance to play the game he loves.
However, not every player is happy about the new addition to the team, wary of how Aiden’s autism will present itself on game day. Tensions rise. A fight breaks out. Cops are called.
Brandon interferes on behalf of his brother, but is arrested by the very same cops who, just hours earlier, were chanting his name from the bleachers. When he’s wrongly charged for felony assault on an officer, everything Brandon has worked for starts to slip away, and the brothers’ relationship is tested. As Brandon’s trial inches closer, Aiden is desperate to figure out what really happened that night. Can he clear his brother’s name in time?
Review: I’m just going to say this right now…this book was intense! So much so that my anxiety got involved and I had to put the book aside to allow myself to calm down. But…do not see this as a bad thing, it is just that writing, the characters, the emotions, was so well written that I was completely drawn into the story and had to force myself out to clear my head. This is DeAndra Davis’s debut novel and her writing is so honest and lovely and gripping that one cannot help but to be drawn into Aiden’s world.
Aiden is the heart of the story and I absolutely fell in love with him. He is at times very witty but also is a very deep thinker, as he is an observer and feels deeply. He is very open about being autistic and Davis does an excellent job of showing Aiden’s thought process, how he masks to try to fit in and to make others comfortable, but also how his body feels and his brain reacts when he’s overstimulated. Aiden is very aware of his “limits” so to speak, but also is willing to work to over come them especially since he wants to play football with his brother. Unfortunately that chance is ripped from both of them (the fight scene was sooo intense and scary! Davis did an amazing job writing the chaos of that scene and the emotions that went along with it.) and they both now have to find their own way. Aiden love for his brother is what propels him to try to clear his brother’s name and to do that really takes him out of his comfort zone. He realizes how much he’s depended upon his brother for so much and uses this “opportunity”, for lack of a better word, to really stretch himself and become who he wants to be. Seeing Aiden grow and change, make good decisions and make some really stupid ones, is what made me love him so much.
Another aspect of the strength of this novel was all the different relationships Davis wrote surrounding Aiden that helped him, but my favorite relationship is the one with his brother. Being about a year apart their closeness and love really came across the page. They had their own way of speaking (through random fun facts) that allowed them to slowly open up to each other when they needed to have heart to heart talks. When the two end up distancing themselves due to the trial, those moments because few and I really felt the pain that Aiden felt as he believed his brother was slipping away from him. This one little aspect of their relationship that Davis created really brought home how siblings of autistic children can relate to each other and the love that exists between them.
Lastly, there was a lot of ableism and racism in this book and Davis did not hold back, which added to the emotion and intensity of the novel. She could have sanitized the story, but I’m glad she didn’t because Black teens, especially autistic Black teens, experience so much discrimination that writing the reality made for a stronger story. All the Noise at Once is a novel for this moment in time that hits on so many relevant themes, but in the end, it’s a story about love and how loving each other can get us through the most difficult of times.