Disabling Characters: Representations of Disability in Young Adult Literature
Disabling Characters: Representations of Disability in Young Adult Literature Patricia A. Dunn. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Print; E Book.Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have witnessed an explosion of young adult literature published in the United States. New and veteran authors are consistently offering more high quality titles to their audiences. As part of this increase, more attention (but still not enough) is being paid to diverse characters. If we want readers, and particularly our students, to understand and celebrate the diversity inherent in their lives and communities, then issues of disability should be included when we consider what it means to be diverse. If, as Rudine Sims Bishop has suggested, we seek mirror and window books to describe how we see both ourselves and others when we read literature, then we must seek out books that authentically represent issues of disability, as well as serve to push our thinking about how disability is represented in our society. With so many titles, and so many ways of looking at texts, selecting appropriate books can be difficult.Thankfully, we now have an outstanding guide to navigating this field. In Disabling Characters, Patricia A. Dunn examines classic and contemporary young adult titles through the lens of disability studies, a theoretical approach "that examines society's role in exacerbating whatever impairments individuals may have" (4) Disability studies has been applied to a range of disciplines in recent years, particularly composition studies; however, as Dunn notes, the approach has been relatively slow in affecting practice in K 12 schools. It is this gap that Dunn's work so expertly addresses. Disabling Characters offers a highly readable, theoretically grounded, yet practically applicable text that can be used by a wide range of teachers, scholars, and students.After a thorough and thoughtful introduction, which describes her terminology, her approach to texts as cultural artifacts, and theories that inform her own critical eye, Dunn devotes the book's remaining chapters to themed discussions of classic and contemporary YA novels. Books such as Ron Jones's The Acorn People (1976) Wendy Orr's Peeling the Onion (1996) Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (2007) and Francisco Stork's Marcelo in the Real World (2009) among many others, receive careful examination as vehicles that can reveal powerful assumptions about disability.Dunn has chosen her titles well, and readers will see that each chapter opens up new awareness of the books individually, and in conversation with each other. I found myself learning things about books I have read (and taught) many times. The lenses that Dunn uses, and the questions that she asks, have influenced the way I look at any titles that discuss disability, and include disabled characters.