Writing for
The Times, author
Andrew Solomon describes the book as a Rosetta Stone for parents of non-verbal autistic children, at times banal and occasionally profound, and says "it will stretch your vision of what it is to be human". He adds that "sometimes, it sounds as though it were the work of a prudent adult pretending to be a 13-year-old boy, because the freshness of voice coexists with so much wisdom". Reviewing several books about autism for
The Boston Globe, Katharine Whittemore describes them as "extraordinary, moving, and jeweled with epiphanies", and says
The Reason I Jump bowled her over. In her
Publishers Weekly review, Clare Swanson writes of Higashida's "candid, emotionally honest answers" that help to demystify behavior and that his "thoughtful, sensitive reasoning delivers illuminating insights". More than one reviewer commented on the painstaking work of using an alphabet grid to write the book. Researcher Yoko Kamio, who reads both English and Japanese, writes "The English translation eliminates some redundancies in the Japanese and is a bit more concise but is generally an accurate translation."
Bloomberg Business News,
The London Evening Standard,
NPR, and
The Observer. In addition to traditional media outlets, the book received attention from autism advocacy groups across the globe, with many, such as
Autism Speaks, conducting interviews with Mitchell. It also received attention from researchers, some of whom
dispute his authorship. Fein and Kamio have raised concerns about the authenticity of Higashida's communication methods, suggesting that his mother may be providing cues, as seen in a video, or that he might be independently typing previously memorized text.
Michael Fitzpatrick, a doctor and parent of an autistic child, criticizes the book and its film, expressing doubts about the communication systems used and saying it is a "myth" that "within the autistic individual a fully competent person is imprisoned, requiring the liberation offered by a quasi-magical technology". ==Adaptations==