Meyer, Abbye E. From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives. UP of Mississippi, 2022. 204 pages. ISBN: 9781496837585

Kavanagh-Ryan, Kit

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122760 Copy

Description

Title

Meyer, Abbye E. From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives. UP of Mississippi, 2022. 204 pages. ISBN: 9781496837585

Author(s)

Kavanagh-Ryan, Kit

Issue Date

2024-01

Keyword(s)

• disability
• young adult literature
• Crip Theory
• book review
• social justice

Abstract

A common observation in disability studies is that historically, disability has been a unifying marginalisation—the one intersection from which other identities hope for distance or even escape (Mitchell & Snyder 3; Davis 277). Problem novels, often dismissed as an inevitable but undesired aspect of adolescent literature (Miskec & McGee 164), occupy a similar space in studies of youth literature. These texts are often considered representative of young adult literature by those outside of children’s literature studies and are often treated defensively by those of us within it as a stereotype the field must overcome. There is, however, very little scholarship explicitly on problem novels. Abbye E. Meyer’s work, From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives, offers a new defence and reinterpretation of the problem novel as she asks readers to consider these significant gaps in the literature: “the ways in which disability and young adult literature interact” and “the kinds of power these interactions produce” (12). As an analysis of American representations of disability and adolescence, Meyer’s work is often compelling, especially in its recontextualization of “exemplary” didacticism (Meyer 96). While I do question the conflation of adolescence as disabling in early chapters as potentially overly diagnostic and easily misread (and as a non-American reader I lament the limitations in attributing the “young adult voice” (16) so squarely to Holden Caufield and Esther Greenwood), Meyer’s work is an important contribution to both literary and disability studies as we continue to engage on topics of representation, voice, and crip power.

Series/Report Name or Number

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature vol. 5, issue 2

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.rydl.v5i2.1404

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2024 Kit Kavanagh-Ryan
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Owning Collections