I suppose first and foremost, I should introduce myself so you all know who I am. My name is Lisa, or Just Another Rabid Reader, or Destinyisntfree on the Twitters. Some of you have seen me around. Some of you may not have. If you aren't sure, I am that chick whose always talking about landing in Twitter jail. It is inevitable that it will happen every time I do a group chat. It is just a fact of life and I have accepted and even embraced it.
I have begun to notice a trend in young adult
novels, or at least in the young adult novels I have read anyway. And before we even get into the meat of it, I
love reading YA, and it is the main genre that I read. I have loved a majority of the books I have
read and this is not meant to be a dig at the genre or the writers. I also write Young Adult, so I would never in
any way try to say anything negative about my brothers and sisters in arms.
But here is the thing. How often do you see a main character in YA
that is a disabled person? How often is
it blatantly obvious that the main character is a minority? I can tell you, I could count the combined
total in the books I have read on one hand.
And that makes me sad. Let me
explain.
I am the parent of a child on the autism
spectrum. I also have another child with
ADHD. Two of my 3 children are
mixed-race and favor their father's heritage and so have darker skin. In a perfect world, race would be irrelevant,
but since we do not live in a perfect world, I just think that it would be nice
if they had books about characters that they could relate to as they hit their
teen years. Maybe I will have to be the
one to write them. Who knows, it could
happen.
But I am going to focus more on the disabilities
angle for this post. As the parent of a
young child who has both autism and what is suspected to be a mild cerebral
palsy, where are all of the young adult characters that have had to overcome a
disability and are thriving? Where are
the heroes and heroines who have to struggle to do things? Is it that people do not want to read about
characters like that? Does that make it
all too real? I don't know.
It is those facts that have prompted the story I am
currently working on. I have published
already a short story that is the prequel, if you will, to the novel. My main character is a teenage boy who is
autistic. <Gasp> Yep, I am going
there. My main character was nonverbal
his entire life, until he was a teenager, and in the course of the story, he
finds his voice and finds out that just because he has difficulties, that does
not mean he cannot accomplish great things.
These are the kinds of stories I want to see available for my
children. They need to have characters
in stories they can relate to. No one
else is writing them, so I will. And my
hope is that, maybe, if I start writing characters like this and people see that
there are people who want to read them, then more stories with characters with
challenges will start to appear in the stories that we read. I would read them. Would any of you?
A Bit About Lisa:
Lisa blogs at http://justanotherrabidreader.info.
You can find her on:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/destinyisntfree
Her blog's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Just-Another-Rabid-Reader/190458081073700
Followers in any form are always appreciated, and
Just Another Rabid Reader is on Bloglovin!
http://www.bloglovin.com/en/blog/6689049
will take you to the page where you can follow!
