Blog

Author Tara Kelly sits down with her newest teen fan to discuss Harmonic Feedback, a young adult novel about a music-loving girl with autism, ADD, and anxiety disorder.

I saw a lot of myself in Drea, and I imagine other autistic folks will be able to do the same. It was so nice to see accurate representation, because as an autistic person, I don’t see that very often.

If our contributors could tell an author writing a character with their disability one thing – besides “do your research” – what would it be?

After second grade, I stopped reading most books unless they were assigned for class. Even then, I often didn’t read them. The reason being, when I read a sentence, I often didn’t understand it. Somewhere between my eyes seeing the words and my brain, the phrase disappeared into the ether.

A brief list of recommendations our contributors put together.

Ever seen the Allstate commercial?  “I’m a random windstorm. Shaky, shaky.” Well, sometimes that’s how life feels when you’re a kid with disabilities.  Because I’m both very random and my life can be, well, pretty shaky.

ADD isn’t an end of the world big deal. It’s really, really not. But it is a deal, it’s a thing. It’s a disability. It puts you on a different default setting.

Perhaps “normal” behavior is best described as a “normative spectrum.”