Autism in Literature

I did my application project on how autism is portrayed in literature. The results I found were much different than I would have thought. First of all there are so many more children’s books about than I thought. Second I never thought that almost all of the books I found would have been so stereotypically. Most of the characters were portrayed as young boys; I actually could not find one book with a female autistic character. A lot of the characteristics of the autistic characters were similar in many of the books. For example, lack of eye contact, lack of communication skills and frustrating to live with. Also for some reason a lot of the books I found were from the standpoint of someone who had an autistic brother. I think this is because children who are exposed to autism are most often the siblings of children with autism because most of the time children with autism attend separate schools.