You Look Different in Real Life is a contemporary YA novel in which the broken friendship between the protagonist and her autistic best friend plays a central role–a thoughtfully handled plot thread that we were eager to talk to author Jennifer Castle about.
Autistic people learn, change, and cope like anyone else. However, when a character is autistic, many authors appear to see only one route for character growth: effectively making the character less autistic.
Clichés, ableist language … what kinds of words, phrases, or situations used in book or character descriptions send up warning flags for our contributors?
s.e. smith’s rave review of Wild Awake was one of the very first posts on this blog. We invited s.e. and author Hilary T. Smith to discuss books, mental illness, and everything in between.
Heidi Heilig and S. Jae-Jones sit down to talk about the book’s portrayal of bipolar disorder, writing mental illness, and writing with a mental illness.
A Q&A with author Corey Ann Haydu about the origins of OCD Love Story and the many and varied ways anxiety can manifest.
When we see institutions in YA, we usually see them in one of two contexts: a “sane” person wrongly incarcerated in one, or a spooky (often old, sometimes abandoned but haunted by ghosts) asylum filled with “crazy people.”
Which are our contributors’ least favorite disability tropes?
April Henry’s main character in Girl, Stolen is a well-researched, well-written example of blindness, and we were thrilled to discuss the book with her.
Today we get most forms of entertainment at the push of a button, so we tend to hate having to wait. The situation is even worse if you can’t read print—resulting in an endless waiting game for blind readers.