I don’t want to be paraded as an expert,” says Patricia Wood, author of the novel Lottery. “An expert is a mother or father who work day-to-day to understand their kid and to get the world ready to welcome him.”

Wood knows a thing or two about the challenges of special needs children and adults. As a special education teacher, her hands-on experience was invaluable in creating her protagonist, Perry L. Crandall, a mentally challenged man who transcends all expectations in this debut novel.  And indeed, it was the authenticity of Perry that both won the notice of book and writing groups, and even the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, which has short listed it this year.

As with most writers, Ms. Wood’s primary goal was to tell a good story. “But if I could tap into some consciousness, to get people to think about their assumptions, all the better,” she says. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in the area of education and disability, Ms. Wood has written extensively about special education, home-schooling for the disabled, and is an advocate for special needs students. However, it became apparent in all the academic journals and even magazines for the disabled that they were all preaching to the same choir. “We know how far people can go,” she says, “yet not enough gets out to the real world. Normal people do not pick up a book to read about special needs adults.”

Rather than type out another article, or non-fiction tome, she chose fiction. Novels can be a more accessible way to reach a large audience and raise awareness of an issue. She wanted to throw a tire iron at the way most people think of the mentally challenged. “Oh, here’s the beggar who’s retarded,” she says, as a means of illustrating the perceptions that many people hold, and indeed, even less knowing writers may choose to create characters. The challenge for her was to create a character the reader could root for, but to flesh him out by giving him desires, goals, tragedies and more importantly, ideas.

“I wanted Perry to be loved for his perceptions, and for the readers to see his ability and gifts,” she says of the protagonist. Other people, like his mother have given up on him, and the schools have a low set of expectations. Pat believes this isn’t atypical, that benchmarks applied evenly across the board to a diverse group of people are unrealistic, and not a true measurement of ability.

“Learning isn’t linear. People learn in all sorts of ways,” she says, of her decision to let Perry’s grandmother yank him out of school, to work at their boatyard. Pat cites a nine-year longitudinal study by Jacques Ensign: "Defying The Stereotypes of Special Education" in the Peabody Journal of Education in 2000. The study compared special needs kids who were home-schooled versus those who went through the traditional educational process. The kids who came out ahead were those who’d been under the guidance of the parent at home, or even on the road. “It was mainly due to the parent’s attitude. They excelled on a higher level because the parent could see the kid’s gifts.” Indeed, the key person in Perry’s life is his grandmother, Gram, who teaches him a word a day in addition to surviving in the world.