It was around this time that she began discouraging people from buying her birthday and Christmas presents; she spent the days after Halloween giving out her own candy to sick children at children´s hospitals. I was inspired to write this story after seeing Sara´s Christian faith in action, and after listening to Sara´s mother tell of Sara´s experiences in the mainstream school setting as a Christian autistic girl. These experiences were often filled with loneliness, frustration, rejection and discrimination, but they resonated with her faith and helped to strengthen it so that she could aspire to give to others what she herself so often had not received.

Sara the Famous is based on a true story, as told in the voice of the author´s young friend Sara, a Christian autistic girl with a deep faith in Jesus. It chronicles Sara´s experience with isolation and discrimination, and it shows the flip side of what such experiences can mean when one´s highest aspiration is to be a different kind of famous: A Jesus kind of famous.

Author Bio

Lisa Jean Collins received her Bachelor of Arts degree in British and American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. During her college years she took elective art classes at various schools in the Philadelphia area, including The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Moore College of Art and Design. After graduating, she worked as a production editor and later worked at home as a freelance editor in order to raise her first child. Drawing from her experience as an English major, her work as an editor, her love and knowledge of the Bible, and her lifelong passion for illustration, she created her first Christian children's book, We Thank You, God, For All These Things, which was self-published in August 2004. Her second book, Sara the Famous, was just self-published in the winter of 2006. As a mother of two sons on the autistic spectrum, Lisa Jean Collins has been very outspoken in her online writings about the need for the general population to respect the rights of autistic people. As a Christian, she wants to show that people with disabilities should never be treated as broken or less than human. Every single person is whole and has a purpose on this earth, and every single person was made in the image of God. Lisa Jean Collins lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and three sons.