Review: The Angel Tree by Daphne Benedis-Grab
Although the author got some of the details about blindness wrong, she seems very committed to diversity, and I enjoyed this book a lot.
Although the author got some of the details about blindness wrong, she seems very committed to diversity, and I enjoyed this book a lot.
The description for this book uses the phrase “brilliant but autistic” to describe its main character, and that’s where our conflicted feelings about Viral Nation start.
Shaunta Grimes’s Viral Nation is the rare YA dystopian novel with an autistic protagonist; we were keen to sit down with the author to discuss the book, its sequel Rebel Nation, and its protagonist Clover Donovan.
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.
The notion of people faking disabilities is not at all new or novel–and, like many, many disability tropes, it’s a harmful one.
Pete’s autism is portrayed over and over again as being non-stop pain and suffering. That got incredibly hard to read; do people really think this is what autism is like?
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!
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.
Audiobooks are an essential part of making reading as accessible as possible, so we’re excited to sit down with marketing manager Jennifer Rubins and head of production Dan Zitt and talk about the behind-the-scenes process of audiobooks.
I was intrigued by the virtual-reality premise, but this book is a veritable hotbed of misogyny and a case study in how not to write a wheelchair-using character.