Alison's Conviction (A Point in Time, #6)

by Thomas Keneally

Alison Strange was a clever girl of whom it was known by her mother, her grandfather, and her teachers that she could not face tests of knowledge. Her mother had been told by psychologists that she would never go to university because the business of analyzing what lecturers and tutors meant by their instructions would utterly panic and exhaust her, and basically send her into fits of Tourette’s, into writhings and repeated meaningless sounds like begging. Tourette’s was frequently found in autism cases, a doctor had said. Alison could learn anything if she was interested, but not under any demand that she should know it. She was self-taught, therefore, and her own motivation to know things was the only but powerful machine for her learning. She had, on her own terms, been to the university of Google, just for a start. She had an account that enabled her to read journal articles of all kinds and randomly.

Because of that boy and his easily set-off admirers, she accepted that the world would choose to be as unkind to her as Taranto was.