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Disability in Kidlit
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Since our founding exactly three years ago, we’ve built up an impressive bank of reviewed titles. Now, we're making the search for good representation even easier.

Introducing … The Disability in Kidlit Honor Roll!

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on Housekeeping

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One of Disability in Kidlit’s main goals has always been to make it easier for readers, librarians, and teachers to find the best disability representation kidlit has to offer. Since our founding exactly three years ago, we’ve built up an impressive bank of reviewed titles, and we’re endlessly proud of the nuance, thoughtfulness, and variety those reviews offer. But we wanted to make the search for good representation even easier.

Introducing … The Disability in Kidlit Honor Roll, a vetted list of books we enthusiastically recommend for their authentic, accurate, and respectful depictions of disability!

For the past year, we’ve been actively compiling this list, carefully considering dozens of MG and YA books with disabled protagonists. (For the purposes of the Honor Roll we decided to exclude books with disabled secondary characters, but there are obviously many wonderful books that fall into that category as well.) While this list is a good start, it is by no means exhaustive. We’ll be regularly adding more selections to it over time as we vet them. If you have any questions about how we determine which books make it onto the Honor Roll, please see our Honor Roll FAQ.

The Honor Roll is designed to help you bring valuable disability representation into your personal, library, and/or school collections. Obviously, we are not the Final Authority on what constitutes good representation—as no such authority exists—but you can be confident that each of the books on this list has been thoroughly vetted and that the Disability in Kidlit editors feel strongly that these books are worth reading and sharing.

So go and explore! You can either browse the entire list at once, or you can use the highly customizable search options. We’ve indicated when there are accompanying reviews, which we encourage you to read for a fuller view of those books.

We sincerely hope this will be a useful resource, and please check back periodically for updates and even more Honor Roll selections! You may also sign up for our brand-new newsletter, as we’ll always let our subscribers know about new Honor Roll additions.



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7 Comments

  1. Lyn Miller-Lachmann on

    What a great idea! However, I suggest you include a larger list of books that maybe aren’t quite perfect to avoid the “single story,” in which there’s only one recommended book about the subject. Maybe in addition to the “honor” book you have links to other, related, books that you’ve reviewed favorably over the years.

  2. Laurie McLean on

    Ooh. Check out TONE DEAF by Olivia Rivers. Features a former piano prodigy now deaf, who as a teen falls in love with a boy band singer. Very interesting.

    • Disability in Kidlit
      Disability in Kidlit on

      Hi Linda. On the Honor Roll page, it links to the FAQ, which answers your question. Unfortunately, as we only feature middle grade and young adult novels with disabled protagonists published by major publishers, it doesn’t look like your books are quite what we’re looking for right now. We hope you enjoy our selections, though!

  4. Izzy on

    This is a lot easier than trying to work a Goodreads page! Don’t get me wrong. I love Goodreads. It’s just tricky to navigate sometimes.

    I see there’s actually a book about Crohn’s Disease… is that the only one you’ve come across? I’d like to read about teens going through the same thing I have, but my mom’s mental health has been suffering because of my condition and I worry bringing home a book where the main characters are hospitalized might make things worse for her…

  5. Mary Ann Walker on

    I work with early childhood teachers. Hopefully, in the future, you will expand to include young children with diverse abilities.