While Rory’s portrayal isn’t flawless, it’s well researched, and a significant step in the right direction of treating autistic characters as regular teenagers and integral parts of the cast.
As The Real Boy was one of our favorite reads of the year, we couldn’t wait to invite author Anne Ursu over to discuss this wonderful, magical middle grade novel about an autistic boy.
Our reviewers interview author and Disability in Kidlit editor Corinne Duyvis about disability tropes, survival in the apocalypse, and writerly research.
After our rave review of Cindy Rodriguez’s debut When Reason Breaks—about two very different girls who are both dealing with depression—we were excited to invite both reviewer and author to the website this week to discuss the book further.
Rogue is one of the rare novels about an autistic character written by an autistic author, and the book raises many intriguing questions to discuss.
s.e. smith’s rave review of Wild Awake was one of the very first posts on this blog. We invited s.e. and author Hilary T. Smith to discuss books, mental illness, and everything in between.
You Look Different in Real Life is a contemporary YA novel in which the broken friendship between the protagonist and her autistic best friend plays a central role–a thoughtfully handled plot thread that we were eager to talk to author Jennifer Castle about.
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?
Science fiction and fantasy tell us that anything can happen, and yet disabled people are often told that their narratives don’t fit into the genres.
Here is a key insight to creating realistic autistic characters: We do not do the visibly autistic things we do because of “autism,” full stop. Like non-autistic people, we are responding to our experiences of the world. Those experiences simply differ from those of non-autistic people.