"A middle grader with a high-function spectrum disorder finds some real friends in this wry debut. Eddie may be a genius when it comes to scientific knowledge and to repurposing broken appliances, but the best he can do socially is to treat others as distractions with inscrutable motives. Falling in with proudly geeky classmate Justin and Justin's maverick friend Terry (whom Eddie thinks is a boy until Justin sets him straight) leads to several breakthroughs, as both see through his habitual brusqueness and are willing to clue him in on the nuances of social cues. The author has a particularly engaging way of tracking Eddie's thought processes as he struggles to wrest order from a seemingly chaotic world, constructs through trial and error an ingenious homemade device for controlling traffic at a dangerous intersection and interacts sans real comprehension with peers and others. By the end readers will understand why Justin and Terry find Eddie worth knowing, but the way the central characters talk and think about science creates another theme that's just as strong and satisfying."
     —Kirkus Reviews

"When your parents name you Edison Thomas after the famous inventor (and a family tradition to name members after famous Thomases), you are a ready target for bullies. If your interest really is inventing, you are brilliant, and you have trouble decoding social cues, you’re an even bigger target. Readers will catch on more quickly than Eddy that his longtime “friend,” Mitch, is behind the mean-spirited pranks that are being played on him. The story’s main plot, about Eddy’s efforts to invent an intersection-warning device to replace the safety crossing guard, who was eliminated in budget cuts, is fun to follow, but this novel’s real strength is Eddy’s gradual understanding of true friendship. Eddy gets counseling to help him decipher the basic social cues that elude him (his condition is never directly stated), and his responses to common idioms are both humorous and sensitively drawn as he learns not to take everything literally. As an added bonus, the text includes related scientific facts, from “The Random Access Memory of Edison Thomas,” which will intrigue budding scientists."
     —Booklist