It’s Autism Awareness month! And that makes it perfect timing for The Framed Women of Ardemore House, a recent mystery featuring an autistic protagonist. I picked this up almost as an afterthought – an English country house murder, with some historical elements.

Before we get into it, though, an apology for all of you. I have been AWOL the entire month of March, as life and work got well away from me. I’d been trying to keep to posting, but things have been busy and burnout hit, hard. The good news is, I think I’m back! And I’ve been doing a LOT of reading, even if I haven’t been able to write about it yet – so hopefully that will lead to some interesting posts as we get through my backlog.

Take a classic mystery story…

There’s a lot about The Framed Women of Ardemore House that feels straight out of the Golden Age. There’s the basic storyline – a protagonist, inheriting a once-grand English estate, moving to a country village. Then there’s the parallel historical plot, suggesting that the sins of the past come back to haunt the present. And there’s the twin narration, following the amateur detective and the professional investigator (a classic Marple trope). You almost expect to see characters complain bitterly about death duties and war-time rationing.

There’s also plenty that Schillace takes from more modern cozy mystery fare. As in the best cozies, Jo must earn her place in a new community. Jo’s a divorcée, unthinkable in a Christie novel. And, of course, there’s the directness of the discussion of mental health and other topics that earlier writers may have left to allusion. The Framed Women of Ardemore House like a blend of mystery traditions old and new, for something surprisingly refreshing.

It is clear from the writing, too, how much Schillace loves writing, particularly mystery stories. The story is chock-full of mystery references, including my favorite Christie. There are also a reasonable number of art history references, a fun little spark each time I ran across them. The story is constructed of layers of puzzles – the modern mystery layered over the historical one, the intellectual mystery and Jo’s social navigation.

It’s worth calling out that, for all its references, the detection in this story is very modern. I’ve been going back to the classics recently, and it’s struck me how much plots used to leverage spontaneity. Jo’s investigation is much more structured, much less inspired by her daily interactions – each new thread requires identification and instigation to pull. Jo’s no career investigator, and she doesn’t exactly have or follow hunches the way a Golden Age detective might. There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s just interesting to notice this difference between old and new.

And add a neurospicy POV

I have a… complicated reaction to Jo, this novel’s protagonist. On the one hand, I love, love, LOVE that we get to see an autistic protagonist. And not only that – a female autistic protagonist! Schillace does a fantastic job with Jo’s behavior, creating a character that, from the outside-in, feels authentically neurospicy. And it’s incredible, as an autistic person myself, to see characters more like me represented in the genre I love best.

And yet, given my own personal experiences of autism, I found it hard to relate to Jo as written. Schillace takes great pains to explain, as it happens, why Jo takes the actions that she does. When Jo behaves in a way that the villagers find odd, Schillace tells the reader exactly the anxiety and concerns that drive that behavior. As a narrator, Jo is extremely self-aware about her impact and the world around her – and is trapped, even paralyzed by it. It’s like reading Miss Marple, if Miss Marple had 1000 times more anxiety.

But. This does not tie with my experience of autism, either pre- or post-diagnosis. While many experiences tire me out, either from overstimulation or a perception of masking (or both), I’m rarely conscious of them in the moment. Rather, when I’m feeling tired after the fact, I can usually break down the root causes – but only when I choose to. There’s no internal monologue reminding me of the social script and all the ways I’ve failed to follow it – in fact, I’m often quite oblivious until someone points something out. There’s just – anxiety, and exhaustion, and the adrenaline of pushing through a day until I get back home. (This is, in large part, why I loved Emily Wilde quite so much.)

Of course, that’s much harder to write, and I imagine so much harder for those without autism to relate with. I’ve read other reviews of this novel, it seems like this narration has helped many NT readers understand autism more deeply. And, of course, my experience is my own, not a universally autistic one that MUST be conveyed in every other autistic protagonist. Yet it was weirdly bittersweet to read The Framed Women of Ardemore House – to see myself both more represented than I ever have been, and to feel so distant from that representation. I’m so, so glad that Jo exists, and I hope we get to see more of her. But I’m not sure that I find her actually relatable, and I wish I did!

An autist’s conundrum

When I first picked up TThe Framed Women of Ardemore House, it was mostly a fun curiosity. I wasn’t expecting to have this may thoughts, and certainly not expecting to cover it here. But Brandy Schillace’s writing totally surprised me, both for what it is, and what it wasn’t.

It’s refreshing to have this kind of explicit representation in the mystery genre. As an autistic mystery reader, I often spend time guessing at which characters might be autistic, based on textual clues. (Poirot is a personal favorite, and I’ve repeatedly said how much I relate to Emily Wilde.) So having a character who I know to be like me is refreshing and encouraging. It’s exciting to have something to point my neurotypical friends at to drive more understanding. And it’s exciting to see my own love for mysteries as a genre reflected in a book that reflects characters like me.

And yet – I’m not sure if it’s modern mystery style, or the need to explain Jo’s actions directly as they happen – but I found the writing a little too direct for my taste. Every single clue, every single explanation, felt a little too clearly spelled out. It seems my taste in writing leans a bit less direct than my own way of walking through the world, which is an interesting contradiction.

To be clear, there’s a lot to love about this book! If you were considering giving it a shot, I still encourage you to do so. And if you’re looking for something that helps you understand the experience of autism a bit more, this is a good, if imperfect, book to add to the pile. For me, personally, it stirred up a lot more introspection than I was expecting from what seemed like a pseudo-classic modern cozy. And if that’s not a good read, I don’t know what is…

I am hoping to keep up my schedule a bit more regularly, so you will hopefully see more soon. Until then – stay cozy, and stay curious!

*This will count for my 52 Book Club Challenge, as the book written by a neurodivergent author!