Hunt captures the inner confusion when you aren’t getting something everyone else grasps easily that is a pre-diagnosed dyslexic’s life. Ally’s situation conjured up so many memories at first that it was hard for me to read, but the reward was great.
In my experience, the disabled sibling in fiction exists purely to make the main character’s life more “difficult,” more “sympathetic.” Oh, that poor dear, the writers want you to think,
I’ve never written fiction about living with Crohn’s, and to be honest, I’ve never wanted to. Perhaps because I still feel what I felt for years growing up: that nobody wants to hear about my annoying, humiliating misery. Yet I know, intellectually, that this is a shame, because there should be more characters in YA literature who live with chronic illnesses like IBD.
The toughest chapter to write in El Deafo, by far, was the chapter in which I reject sign language.
The “autism voice”—characterized by narrative devices and a detached character voice—tends to portray autistic characters as unworldly, hyper-rational blank slates defined purely by a series of unusual behaviors.
“How did you manage to capture that voice?” beta readers would ask. “How did you know to describe those particular feelings?” I was starting to have a few self-revelations about that.
Your Voice is All I Hear will familiarize readers with common symptoms, while normalizing schizophrenia as an illness like any other; however, it is obvious that this book’s target audience is not those with schizophrenia themselves.
Despite good ideas and wonderful writing, Brilliant falls flat when it comes to having any constructive meaning regarding depression.
Tommy Smythe disappears one Friday night, and even after weeks of searching he can’t be found. This is the story of a rural community’s search for Tommy, and the complicated social networks created by wrongdoings and secrets in a small town.
Charlie Cooper is your average, down-to-earth girl—who happens to be disabled. But occasionally, this normalcy backfires.