Not Otherwise Specified – Disability in Kidlit

A former ballerina in recovery for an eating disorder makes an unlikely friend in her therapy group.

Not Otherwise Specified

From the award-winning author of Break and Teeth comes a raw and honest exploration of complicated identities in a novel about a girl living on the fringe of every fringe group in her small town.

Etta is tired of dealing with all of the labels and categories that seem so important to everyone else in her small Nebraska hometown.

Everywhere she turns, someone feels she’s too fringe for the fringe. Not gay enough for the Dykes, her ex-clique, thanks to a recent relationship with a boy; not tiny and white enough for ballet, her first passion; not sick enough to look anorexic (partially thanks to recovery). Etta doesn’t fit anywhere — until she meets Bianca, the straight, white, Christian, and seriously sick girl in Etta’s therapy group. Both girls are auditioning for Brentwood, a prestigious New York theater academy that is so not Nebraska. Bianca might be Etta’s salvation…but can Etta be saved by a girl who needs saving herself?

Practical information

Author: Hannah Moskowitz
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (Simon Pulse)
Publication year: 2015
ISBN: 9781481405966
Age category: young adult
Disabilities portrayed: eating disorder, mental illness
Genre: contemporary

Author

Hannah Moskowitz wrote her first story, about a kitten named Lilly on the run from cat hunters, for a contest when she was seven years old. It was disqualified for violence. Her first book, Break, was on the ALA's 2010 list of Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, while her novel Gone, Gone, Gone (2012) was a Stonewall Honor Recipient and Teeth (2013) earned starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, and The Bulletin. Not Otherwise Specified was named the Bisexual YA Book of the Year in 2016 by the Bisexual Book Awards. She lives in Maryland.

[YA] can’t get too edgy for me. But I think it’s important that we keep building this huge amount of breadth we have going for us in YA. We don’t want to be edgy for the sake of being edgy, you know? There’s room for everything, and there should be.

(Old People Writing for Teens, April 2010)