AIR

A 12-year-old athlete needs new wheels to practice riskier moves in wheelchair motocross.

Emmie’s a daredevil, just like her dad used to be, though her ratty old wheelchair isn’t really up to the jumps, wheelies, and speed she loves. She annoys school staff by doing tricks around campus despite the inaccessibility of the building and portable classrooms. After a mishap, the school imposes an unwanted classroom aide upon her, and a chain of aide-to-teacher gossip leads the school to hold a fundraiser for Emmie’s dream wheelchair. That would sure be faster than Emmie’s continuing to sell custom wheelchair bags online (lovely details about her customers normalize wheelchair use among everyone from a hunter to a LARPer to an entomologist). One customer, AK_SalmonGranny, becomes Emmie’s sounding board as she wrestles with her school’s patronizing paternalism but scolds her for participating in the fundraiser. Emmie’s journey is a solid-but-pleasurable delivery vehicle for any number of Very Important Messages. Emmie is angered by inaccessible architecture and enraged by inspirational glurge. Her coming-of-age, during which she bizarrely learns that as a child from a working-class home whose insurance won’t cover a new wheelchair for some years she apparently shouldn’t accept help buying a new one, is ill-suited to a tale that’s otherwise openly didactic about the social model of disability. Whiteness is situated as the default; contextual clues point to racial diversity in the supporting cast.

A fun, fierce heroine fights architectural ableism with the powers of friendship and capitalism.