Like No Other Boy is a 2020 novel by Larry Center.
It follows Chris Crutcher and his eight-year-old autistic son Tommy, who has an uncanny ability to communicate with chimpanzees.
Like No Other Boy contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Obo the chimp was rejected by his mother, who bit and abused him and would have killed him if he hadn't been removed from her. By the time he arrived at the Weller Institute, he was traumatized and withdrawn.
- Affectionate Nickname: "Tom-Tom."
- Alliterative Name: Chris Crutcher likes his name for this reason.
- Beard of Sorrow: Tommy's stepdad Wade stops shaving while he's in intensive care after being badly injured during a seizure.
- Character Tics: Tommy makes motorboat sounds. He also chews on his knuckles until they're bloody, despite Chris's efforts to discourage him.
- Disability Superpower: Tommy's visual thinking style and difficulty with language comprehension give him the ability to empathize with chimpanzees.
- Distant Finale: Two years later, Chris, Rachel, and Tommy are spending the summer in the Gombe Jungle.
- Good Old Ways: The primatologist Rachel Simmons fondly remembers her time in the Gombe Jungle, immersed in nature without modern conveniences, when she discovered a new kind of clarity that felt like going from living in black and white to living in color.
- Grumpy Old Man: Chris's father is such a grouch that he and Cheryl joke about him getting a job as the anti-greeter at Wal-Mart, where he'd yell, "Get the hell outta here. Just go home! All sales are cancelled!"
- Handshake Refusal: Rachel reaches for Tommy's hand, but he jerks away and stuffs both hands into his mouth.
- Hand Signals: Tommy has been taught a number of signs so he can still communicate when he loses speech. He uses them to talk to the chimps at the Weller Institute, who are part of a study on sign language in chimps.
- Hates Being Touched: Tommy lets Chris brush his hair, but otherwise hardly lets him touch him at all.
- I Want My Mommy!: Tommy calls for his mother in between seizures.
- Picky Eater: All Tommy's food has to be cut into geometric shapes.
- Security Blanket: Tommy's favorite Beanie Baby, Radar the bat, which he carries everywhere. After his connection with chimps is discovered, he gets another toy, Monkey the monkey.
- Sensory Overload: Tommy seems barely affected by big things like his parents' divorce, but he finds unexpected sensory input excruciatingly painful.
- Tantrum Throwing: Tommy is inconsolable over Cheryl and Wade's plans to move him to a new school in Texas, away from Chris and the chimps, and starts throwing things before having a seizure.
- Why Couldn't You Be Different?: The main reason for the Crutchers' divorce was that Cheryl was obsessed with bending Tommy towards normalcy by any means necessary, to the point of trying to interfere with his chimp therapy because she disapproves of anything resembling an obsession.
