When I read past a certain point in the Vorkosigan series, I may have literally shrieked out loud, startling my partner of the time, and I'm pretty sure I spent a couple minutes babbling incoherently before I managed to put into words, "You HAVE to read these books, if only because they SHOW HOW MY BRAIN WORKS."
Miles is quite literally the first character I have read whose hypomania and hyper-multi-focus is EXACTLY like mine. I'd found characters before that showed my personality in other lights but this was the first time I'd seen someone being shown with active hypomania and hyper-multi-focus. So it was a Really Big Deal.
There are a couple of other books/series that have had similar responses from me regarding disability. There's one that's in progress, by an author I found on Tumblr, of all places. It's a superhero type setting where the bad guys are actually the good guys, and the whole of the primary cast has SOME kind of disability. The series is The Antagonists by Burgandi Rakoska, who I believe is herself disabled. If I'm remembering correctly, she started the series because she couldn't find books with adequate representation.
They aren't perfect, there's definite flaws, but they were a lot of fun, dealt with disability issues, and showed multiple different types of disabilities, which was awesome.
The other series is Mishell Baker's Borderline, starting with the book of that name. I should give the caveat that I have met the author, at the 2014 Writing the Other workshop. She was a fellow student who had recently been contracted. This book is honestly what made me go, "Oh, fuck," and realize that yes, my former psych was quite likely accurate in her assessment of my having borderline personality disorder. The main and viewpoint character of this series has BPD, and the author has been very outspoken about her own experiences as someone who has BPD, too.
It's really well done, although it does need to come with TWs for suicidal ideations and suicide attempts. The majority of the cast is disabled in some way, and primarily (but not solely) deals with mental health issues. It does suffer from the disability-as-superpower trope, but the author handles it in a believable way and it doesn't mean that there aren't major issues as a result of those mental health issues and disabilities. I generally am annoyed by disability-as-superpower but this one didn't bother me too much, probably because it was written by someone who has actual personal lived experience with these issues.
Anyway. I figured I'd peep in and let you know of those, since trying to find books with disabled protagonists that don't suck is... yeah...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2017-11-10 10:54 pm (UTC)Miles is quite literally the first character I have read whose hypomania and hyper-multi-focus is EXACTLY like mine. I'd found characters before that showed my personality in other lights but this was the first time I'd seen someone being shown with active hypomania and hyper-multi-focus. So it was a Really Big Deal.
There are a couple of other books/series that have had similar responses from me regarding disability. There's one that's in progress, by an author I found on Tumblr, of all places. It's a superhero type setting where the bad guys are actually the good guys, and the whole of the primary cast has SOME kind of disability. The series is The Antagonists by Burgandi Rakoska, who I believe is herself disabled. If I'm remembering correctly, she started the series because she couldn't find books with adequate representation.
They aren't perfect, there's definite flaws, but they were a lot of fun, dealt with disability issues, and showed multiple different types of disabilities, which was awesome.
The other series is Mishell Baker's Borderline, starting with the book of that name. I should give the caveat that I have met the author, at the 2014 Writing the Other workshop. She was a fellow student who had recently been contracted. This book is honestly what made me go, "Oh, fuck," and realize that yes, my former psych was quite likely accurate in her assessment of my having borderline personality disorder. The main and viewpoint character of this series has BPD, and the author has been very outspoken about her own experiences as someone who has BPD, too.
It's really well done, although it does need to come with TWs for suicidal ideations and suicide attempts. The majority of the cast is disabled in some way, and primarily (but not solely) deals with mental health issues. It does suffer from the disability-as-superpower trope, but the author handles it in a believable way and it doesn't mean that there aren't major issues as a result of those mental health issues and disabilities. I generally am annoyed by disability-as-superpower but this one didn't bother me too much, probably because it was written by someone who has actual personal lived experience with these issues.
Anyway. I figured I'd peep in and let you know of those, since trying to find books with disabled protagonists that don't suck is... yeah...
- Tris (formerly, Nonny)