Posts contained in the “Disabled” category:

Literature in which the primary characters are disabled, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally.

I Am Not Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos


Share this…             If you’ve been following this blog, then you know how much I love the Joey Pigza books and how accurately they depict the life of a young boy with ADHD. You also know that this is a series that many young people, especially boys, really seem to connect with. So I was a little …read more…


The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie


Share this…             Update as of 26 October 2011: This book continues to be controversial. Only this past spring, I was asked to help fight a push to not just remove this book from the twelfth grade curriculum of a public high school, but to remove the book from the school library, as well. The irony is …read more…


Angry Management by Chris Crutcher


Share this…             In this engaging trilogy of novellas, Chris Crutcher has taken a handful of characters from his earlier works—Sarah Byrnes, Angus Bethune, John Simet, Matt Miller, and Montana West—and imagined them “living outside of their original times and in some cases outside of their original settings” as he describes in his introduction (n. pag.). If …read more…


My Name is Brain Brian by Jeanne Betancourt


Share this…             If you’ve read my posts up to now, you’ll know how strongly I feel about what makes a book work or not. And if you’ve read my “10+ Rules” page (see the link above) and I tell you that the first chapter of this book is called “The Jokers Club” (sic) you can pretty …read more…


Hank Zipzer Revisited: A Tale of Two Tails by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver


Share this…             A while back, I wrote a less than favorable review of Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver’s first book in the Hank Zipzer series, Niagara Falls, or Does It? I have since learned that they have recently published the seventeenth novel in the series, A Brand New Me! (a title which is as off-putting as …read more…


Encouraging Summer Reading


Share this…             Keeping kids reading during the summer is important. We want to encourage our kids to read and to enjoy it, but we need to strike a fine balance between making it optional and making it mandatory. The following tips come to us via ADDitude Magazine. While these tips are aimed at children with ADD/ADHD, …read more…


Hank Zipzer: Niagara Falls, Or Does It? by Henry Winkler & Lin Oliver


Share this…              Hank Zipzer isn’t your average fourth-grader. He’s intelligent, creative, and incredibly likeable. Yet he does terribly at school because he’s dyslexic. Although the “d-word” doesn’t appear anywhere in this book, Hank mentions his brain and his “learning differences” enough for it to become annoying. I’m starting to feel as if I should get …read more…


What Would Joey Do? by Jack Gantos


Share this…              If you’ve already read what I’ve written about the first two books in this series (Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key and Joey Pigza Loses Control) you can guess pretty easily that I love this book as well and heartily recommend it to you. And you would be right. There really is no such …read more…


Joey Pigza Loses Control by Jack Gantos


Share this…              At the end of Joey Pigza swallowed the Key, Joey finally had it together. He was living with his working mom in a more stable home, he was on the right meds, and he had gained enough self-control to get a dog, a dachshund/Chihuahua cross he christens Pablo. Alas, nothing good can ever …read more…