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UNBROKEN

Name: UNBROKEN
Author: Marieke Nijkamp
ISBN: 978-0-374-30650-2

13 STORIES STARRING DISABLED TEENS

edited by Marieke Nijkamp ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2018

For intersectional representations of disabled kids leading complex lives—sometimes painful, sometimes funny, never...

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Thirteen realistic, fantasy, and science-fiction stories starring disabled teenagers.

These tales feature teens with different mental illnesses and physical, sensory, and intellectual disabilities, but all share common threads: no overcoming disability, magical healing, or disability-as-metaphor; just kids shaped by their bodies and minds, their experiences, and the worlds they inhabit. The #ownvoices tales (all by disabled authors) feature a few standouts. Schneider Award winner Francisco X. Stork’s (Disappeared, 2017, etc.) protagonist is a cognitively disabled Mexican immigrant who hears voices and who makes a friend. Dhonielle Clayton’s (The Belles, 2018, etc.) heroine, a black girl with gastrointestinal disease, pens an advice column. William Alexander (A Festival of Ghosts, 2018, etc.) offers a cane-using Latinx boy with chronic pain who accidentally animates the spirit of Richard III. Disability drives the plots at different levels: Corinne Duyvis’ (On the Edge of Gone, 2016, etc.) cursed wish-granter, a 17-year-old girl who likes girls, may not even be noticeably autistic to some neurotypical readers, while the anxiety of Katherine Locke’s (The Spy with the Red Balloon, 2018, etc.) programming heroine might prevent her from saving her city during an extraplanetary attack. Heidi Heilig’s (For a Muse of Fire, 2018, etc.) heroine has mania and depression in ancient China, where her condition is seen as bad fate.

For intersectional representations of disabled kids leading complex lives—sometimes painful, sometimes funny, never sentimentally inspirational—a vital collection . (Anthology. 13-17)

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-374-30650-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

Categories:

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION

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SPLINTER & ASH
by Marieke Nijkamp

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AFTER WE BURNED
by Marieke Nijkamp

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SPLINTER & ASH
by Marieke Nijkamp

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AMINA

From the Through My Eyes series

by J.L. Powers ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2015

Readers don’t always need another heroine—sometimes a young woman living an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances...

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Amina Khalid is a sweet, amiable teenager—and a solid counterexample to Islamophobia and negative notions about Somalis.

The 14-year-old Somali Muslim teenager lives in war-fractured Mogadishu. She shares her grenade-damaged home with pregnant Khadija, elderly Ayeeyo, her older brother, Roble, and her father, political artist Samatar Khalid. Unlike the stereotypes of Muslim men oppressing Muslim women and girls, Amina’s loving father and exasperated brother support the “itch in her fingertips” that “[drives] her to keep creating.” Like her dad, Amina creates renegade art—not paintings on canvas like Samatar, but multimedia street art using bombed-out buildings, hoarded charcoal, poetry, cloth strips, and other pieces of her beloved metropolis. Powers’ prose is honest, though descriptions of events such as giving birth as a circumcised woman, kidnappings by real-life Islamist group al-Shabab, and death are sometimes elliptically described. She leavens Amina’s difficult situation with school, crushes, unexpected friendships, faith, spoken-word face-offs, and real-life context as Amina and her fellow citizens reconfigure what “normal” means for their families, city, and, by extension, country. Taken as a whole, this entry in the Through My Eyes series is solid but not gripping—and that’s OK.

Readers don’t always need another heroine—sometimes a young woman living an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances will wilt stereotypes better than heroics. (map, author’s note, timeline, glossary, further reading) (Fiction. 13-16)