
Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
“I learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia,” this book’s protagonist starts off in its in-universe foreword, and I grinned and said, “YES! This is going to be good.”
“I learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia,” this book’s protagonist starts off in its in-universe foreword, and I grinned and said, “YES! This is going to be good.”
We recap the highlights of our #diklSFF Twitter chat, including a link to the full Storify.
Despite reservations about the ending, I would recommend The Rest of Us Just Live Here; it’s a welcome addition to YA novels involving OCD and anxiety.
Although Kurt’s character seems to largely exist to serve the central romance, I was pleasantly surprised by how many pitfalls Perkins avoided in a wonderfully understated manner. Various assumptions and tropes were casually turned over with a single line here or there.
I could criticize the focus on “fixing” and of the correlation between unwantedness and disability, but the book is focused on unwantedness in a broader fashion; Ava is as challenged by her circumstances as she is by her clubfoot.
From a mythology buff’s perspective, I was delighted with Odd and the Frost Giants. From a disability perspective, though, I was confused.
This book portrays its autistic protagonist in ways that will give readers negative, incorrect, and in some cases abusive ideas about autistic people.
Despite their proclamations to the contrary—“don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease”—the characters are shown to have nothing in their lives that isn’t about their cancer.
We have so few stories—especially lighthearted ones—with wheelchair-using characters that I’d hoped I’d be able to recommend I Funny, but it’s a dangerous narrative wrapped up and presented as “good messages.”
While we’re never told exactly what Marcelo’s impairment is, and it’s implied that no one can quite figure it out, it shares many features that will be familiar to those of us on the autism spectrum.