Review: When We Collided by Emery Lord
Vivi’s struggle with bipolar disorder was portrayed accurately and compassionately, and I would highly recommend the book for readers who want to understand the illness better.
Vivi’s struggle with bipolar disorder was portrayed accurately and compassionately, and I would highly recommend the book for readers who want to understand the illness better.
Wonderstruck is wonderful. It is, to date, the most creative and ambitious novel about the d/Deaf experience in America I’ve ever come across.
Princess Tilda does not demonstrate the need to “overcome” her clubfoot, that word many of us in the disability community have come to loathe. To me, Tilda represents a new kind of heroine, who is strong and doesn’t need saving, but also acknowledges and shows her vulnerability and insecurities.
Blind characters seem to always go too far in either one direction or the other—either completely ruled by their disability, or completely unfazed. The truth is, I hate both, because neither is honest.
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.
A mistake I see a lot of writers who write about disability make is asking only one person for help. I’ve heard so many people say things like, “I have a cousin who is blind, and she read the book and said it was good at portraying blindness.”
Here’s the thing no one tells you about people with a medical condition: The disease is always on their mind, but they don’t always want to think about it.
When I received my diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome seven years ago, I thought of all the young people today who face the social challenges and bullying that I faced decades earlier. I wanted to create a character like me, but one who fights back against the way others treat her in a way that I never did.
We’ve been wanting to shake hands with the good folks of the Schneider Family Book Award–an ALA award which highlights depictions of disability in children’s literature–for a while, and July 2014 marked the perfect time: while we celebrated our first anniversary, the Schneider celebrated its tenth!
Predictably, many of the tropes relating to D/deaf and hard of hearing characters deal with communication methods and degree of hearing loss. Most, if not all, of these tropes have to do with people’s assumptions and wishful thinking about hearing loss.