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A good ending doesn’t erase the time I spent feeling isolated, excluded, and hurt because of the way Rose is treated.

The pain of being the butt of someone else’s joke comes back to me whenever I read fiction that depicts characters on the autism spectrum who repeatedly take idioms and other expressions literally, or fail to understand the double meaning of words in embarrassing ways.

The world does its best to remove our autism from the mainstream narrative of life, hiding either it or us whenever possible. In the world of fiction, we often see these same attempts.

This book portrays its autistic protagonist in ways that will give readers negative, incorrect, and in some cases abusive ideas about autistic people.

Overall, I was very pleased with Al Capone Does My Shirts and how it depicts autism. Moose and Natalie are complex and endearing characters who remain with you long after the book is closed.

Marketing departments choose to focus a book in a certain way when they write these summaries, and summaries for kidlit featuring autism often seem to focus on the same things.

What’s missing here is not any aspect of how the autistic character is depicted, per se—what’s missing is something subtler in the narrator’s depiction, and in her point of view.

During April 2015, we’re holding an event dubbed Autism on the Page. Why is this event important? And what can you expect from us?

While Call’s disability informs his character, it’s hardly the focus of the story, and I appreciated that. What I liked even more was the way Black and Clare treated Call’s disability when they did mention it.

Background, details, and other information regarding our upcoming “Autism on the Page” event.

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 gorgeous look, a brand-new domain, exciting new features, and more on the horizon!

The parallel journeys of Emily and Elizabeth allow author Rodriguez to explore two different expressions of depression, and show her deep understanding of the manifold ways that depression affects people.

Despite elements that I saw as didactic or inauthentic, there is a lot that kids will like in this book.

The writing and characters are wonderful, but if you’re looking for a book about depression, I’d pass on this one.

There was something in this story — some intimate, intangible Knowing — that made me believe, This author has been here. This author has walked in these shoes.

The entire Disability in Kidlit team wishes you a spectacular 2015!

When it comes to writing, we have to be willing to examine, with suspicion, our own character creation and world-building.

Despite some flaws, it is clear the author did his research. I enjoyed this book and recommend it.

All in all, 100 Sideways Miles is not a perfect portrayal of what it means to have epilepsy. But it is respectful and spoke to me on unexpected levels.

Although the book was fun and interesting in places, the disability aspect was very much a freak-show presentation of disability and the disabled experience.

At its core, the Mystical Disabled Person trope is about a disabled character — frequently mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and/or blind — with some sort of unusual ability. This trope is varied, flexible, and depressingly common.

When privileged outsiders define us, they often do so out of ignorance, self-interest, or malice, and their versions of ourselves, rather than our own realities, become the norm.

A princess with a clubfoot. Who can resist? We can’t, and apparently the Schneider Family Book Award jury couldn’t, either. Merrie Haskell’s 2014 win of the award was just one of the reasons we wanted to discuss her MG fantasy novel Handbook for Dragon Slayers with her.