The Ostrich and Other Lost Things by Beth Hautala (review)

Olivia’s older brother, Jacob, has lost his toy ostrich, and eleven-year-old Olivia is determined to find it, believing that the intensification of his autism-related melt-downs is related to anxiety over losing his favorite comfort object. A bad decision on her part leads to her having to do community service at a traveling zoo near her home, where she meets Charlie, the blind son of the zoo’s caretaker. Charlie and she become friends, so she enlists his help in solving another mystery: who’s letting the zoo’s ostrich out so that she ends up in Olivia’s yard several nights a week? Hautala draws these and other disparate plot threads together thematically as Olivia reflects in accessibly concrete ways on the various roles people play in the shows their families stage. While readers with neurodiverse siblings are the obvious audience for this, the anxieties Olivia expresses and her attempts to control outcomes will resonate with a much broader spectrum of tweens.