as small as a world and as large as alone

9:11am June 22, 2014

im-the-asshole-that:

andreashettle:

lifeofallison:

Anyone know any fictional young adult books about teens with disabilities? I’ve read Five flavors of dumb.

Check out these blogs to find more books with disabled characters:

http://disabilityinkidlit.wordpress.com

http://disabilityinkidlit.tumblr.com

These are meant to be for writers who want to write disability, but also sometimes review books with disabled characters, or have blog posts written by book authors.

In both Tumblr and Twitter, you can also try #DiversifyYourShelves tag (and #WeNeedDiverseBooks): these are not limited to disability, but include disability as one aspect of diversity. The downside of these is that sometimes the people making book representations are not themselves people with disabilities and thus might not have enough awareness to pick up on problematic stereotyped characters or other problematic elements.  The advantage of the Disability in Kid Lit blogs is that people who run the blogs (and contributing writers etc) are themselves people with disabilities, so if someone there says they like a book you know they’re speaking from their own experience and not just from stereotypes.

im-the-asshole-that said:

Here are a couple more lists. 

http://www.yahighway.com/2011/04/great-characters-with-disabilities-in.html

^ Rec list by an author in the genre

http://dearauthor.com/need-a-rec/if-you-like-misc/if-you-like-books-about-characters-with-disabilities/

^Another rec list by a person with disabilities

http://writerinawheelchair.blogspot.com/2011/06/books-with-disabled-characters-part-1.html

^And another rec list. (The font is kind of bright and overstimulating for me so if that’s a thing for you take note)

Also from personal experience The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night is an EEEXCELLENT book about Autism/Asperger’s syndrome.

That last recommendation has serious detractors among autistic people.  I liked some parts of it, but most of it I found to be as if he’d spliced the character together from a stereotype he got from reading too much Uta Frith and Simon Baron-Cohen without actually knowing any real autistic people.  Would NOT recommend it to anyone who doesn’t know, from the inside, what autism is like.  It paints us as robots.

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