After second grade, I stopped reading most books unless they were assigned for class. Even then, I often didn’t read them. The reason being, when I read a sentence, I often didn’t understand it. Somewhere between my eyes seeing the words and my brain, the phrase disappeared into the ether.
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.
It’s sadly hard to see beyond Emma’s reflections on what she can’t do now that she’s lost her sight to actually find out how she’s adapting and adjusting.
Although I sometimes genuinely enjoyed myself while reading this book, those times were unfortunately outweighed by the serious inaccuracies.
Despite good ideas and wonderful writing, Brilliant falls flat when it comes to having any constructive meaning regarding depression.
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,
That’s the thing about disability, I think. You’re a normal person, you experience normal things, and then, every once in a while, you hit that wall. That reminder that you aren’t quite like the majority of your peers.
The first time I’ve really seen someone in a book who is just like me, and she turns out to be a superhero.
An estimated 1 in 7 women suffer from chronic pelvic pain; it’s bizarre and disappointing that despite these statistics, there are distinctly zero characters with this condition.
ADD isn’t an end of the world big deal. It’s really, really not. But it is a deal, it’s a thing. It’s a disability. It puts you on a different default setting.