YA books with disabled characters (crossposted)

[haddayr]

I am looking for some that aren't hateful, disablist crap that, for instance, say that a girl in an iron lung should want to die and we're all so relieved when she DOES die.

Anyone with a few good recos?

Comments

[pandorasblog]

A Different Life by Lois Keith - it's a realistic portrayal of a girl getting used to an acquired disability, and fighting for proper access at her school. What's awesome is that it shows her continuing to do the normal teenage stuff like make friends and start dating, but it neither does it in a messagey way nor erases the fact that there are new practicalities to figure out because she uses a wheelchair. It's one of the few fictional books I've read that really reflected my experiences as a teenager in hospital, going through a lot of tests, and for that alone I would've appreciated it, but the whole book is great. And, as I'd guessed, I've just read that the author is herself disabled

[elettaria]

Just wanted to say thanks for the lovely message, I've been a bit brain-dead lately and keep forgetting to do stuff (yay for codeine. Or not), but I will get round to it sooner or later, kick me if I forget.

[pandorasblog]

Oh, no worries; I know the braindeadness all too well!!

[dwgism]

Good article and well worth the read! Thanks for pointing it out.

[elettaria]

And having now read that Disability Now article, it makes lots of excellent points but also makes some incredible mistakes. The one that most people will spot will be the failure to notice "Mad-Eye" Moody in J.K. Rowling, hardly a minor character and one I'd consider worthy of discussion, not to mention the various injuries and markings, not curable by a potion, which some characters pick up by the end of the series. But the statement which really made me sit up in disbelief was this one:

For more than one and a half centuries, poor crippled Tiny Tim has had to stand - or rather sit - as a lonely and tragic symbol of disability in fiction.Bull. Shit. If that reviewer thinks Tiny Tim is the only disabled character in 150 years of fiction (I'm assuming they don't know anything about fiction earlier than that), then they have evidently read so very little that they should not be writing articles about literature at all. (Although I suspect that this may have been an accident due to someone else writing the subtitle.) Fiction is

[pandorasblog]

And having now read that Disability Now article, it makes lots of excellent points but also makes some incredible mistakes. The one that most people will spot will be the failure to notice "Mad-Eye" Moody in J.K. Rowling, hardly a minor character and one I'd consider worthy of discussion, not to mention the various injuries and markings, not curable by a potion, which some characters pick up by the end of the series.Excellent point - and now you mention it, there were a couple of other things that bugged me about HP being used as an example of there being no representation

[elettaria]

Somehow I've managed to forget that the central character in the Earthsea books, Ged (Sparrowhawk), is mildly disabled, due to a tussle with the powers of darkness when he's an arrogant 15 year old that leaves him badly facially scarred, I think with a limp, and slower of study than before. It changes his personality, as a traumatic experience of that sort would, and in many ways he takes it as a learning experience, studying all the harder now that it's no longer easy for him (student wizard). It's roughly analogous to a teenager drunk-driving and getting injured in a crash, I think.

[pandorasblog]

Oh wow... that really makes me want to hurry up and read those books!