Image Description: A stock photo of a hand holding a stack of three books.
Quality novels containing protagonists with a disability are hard to come by.
Trust me, I've looked.
However, I have stumbled upon a handful of such books that you may enjoy! These characters move the plot, are believable, and best of all, have personalities! I will introduce them in order of publication date, give an official description from Goodreads, and then my personal thoughts on the characters of interest and the stories as a whole.
Image Descriptions: On the left, Cover design for All The Light We Cannot See. A picture of Saint-Malo in a blue filter. On the left, fan art of Marie-Laure, a girl with light brown hair, a cane, a cream sweater, and a green skirt. She stands barefoot in the wind.
1. Marie-Laure in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014)
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
- Goodreads
This one should not come as a surprise to historic fiction fans. It's not the earliest published book on this list, but it deserves to go first since this is a novel ten years in the making. And it SHOWS. The astounding detail Doerr pours into this story fully immerses the reader into the daily life of a blind girl. The number of steps from her house to the museum. What it's like to learn braille. How one would operate a homemade radio by touch.
My own words cannot properly convey just how enchantingly this story is written. Marie-Laure as a character, in my sighted opinion, balances a believable experience with flowery prose. A high recommendation from me!
Image Descriptions: On the left, a graphite illustration of Rose from the book. She looks up with big, earnest eyes. In the middle, the cover design for Wonderstruck. A cloudy blue night sky over a city. A single bolt of lightning strikes down the center. On the right, a graphite illustration of Ben from the book. A boy with straight parted hair looks questioningly to the right.
2. Rose and Ben in Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick (2011)
Ben and Rose secretly wish for better lives. Ben longs for the father he has never known. Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother's room and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing.
Set fifty years apart, these two independent stories - Ben's told in words, Rose's in pictures - weave back and forth in symmetry.
- Goodreads
I literally just finished this novel as I'm typing this out and, my God, what an endearing adventure! This one also shouldn't come as a surprise since it has won and been nominated for about as many awards as All The Light we Cannot See. The acknowledgements by Selznick reveal the massive amount of assistance he received from the Deaf community, including his hard-of-hearing brother. In a way, it feels like the novel is a boiled down and highly concentrated story based on all the lives of the people he met and interviewed to make this book come to life.
I include these characters as "disabled" because, for the majority of their adventures, they don't know Sign Language. Before the advent and wide dissemination of ASL, along with other accessibility things like captions, the divide between the Deaf and Hearing populations was to the point of deafness being classified as a disability. Which sucks.
It's a unique novel telling two separate yet mirrored stories about two deaf kids. One told through words, the other in charcoal illustrations. One is deafened later in life, the other is born deaf. One is from the '70s, the other from the '20s. Both intertwine and pack a beautiful punch that tween readers and adults can enjoy alike.
Image Descriptions: On the left, cover design for Iron Widow. Wu Zetian poses in elegant filigree amidst fiery phoenix feathers. On the right, Illustration of Wu Zetian and love interest Yizhi. Yizhi sits on the edge of a bed, reaching for Zetian, who reaches for him from her wheelchair. They look longingly at each other.
3. Wu Zetian in Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (2021)
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn't matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.
When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it's to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.
To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.
- Goodreads
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