Stories about Strength and Disability: How We Get Along

Is it possible that the happiest and saddest moment of your life can be one and the same?

—Darren Groth (255)

The suggestion that heartache and joy overlap and intermingle is a running theme in the books under review here, all of which foreground physical and cognitive disabilities. What drives the four YA novels is a departure from the overworked trope of disability as metaphor or as all-inclusive tragedy, while the picture books do not quite achieve this aim. For the most part, each book resists depicting wretched and heart-breaking conclusions as inevitable, instead portraying a “realistic” coalescence of struggle and pleasure, difficulty and joy, hardship and fun. In particular, the YA books centre on interpersonal relationships between neurotypical teens and teens with autism and Down syndrome. Despite their very different form and content, then, they all feature vibrant protagonists with disabilities, as opposed to merely offering a “how to” for normative readers to learn how to associate with or accept representations of disability.

Lola and I, a picture book written by Chiara Valentina Segré and illustrated by Paolo Domeniconi, is the story of a young woman and her dog.¹ The story is set up in such a way that readers are tempted to assume that the “I” telling the story is the young woman speaking about a dog she has rescued and befriended. When the first-person narrator informs readers that “I was very clever at school,” for example, the image of the young woman pictured on the cover of the book comes to mind. Thus, the first few pages invite readers to picture a young woman who takes in a pet that previously has been ill-treated and needs care and attention. The illustrations initially support this assumption: a young woman and a dog are pictured staring (and in one scene, glaring) at each other, walking through a park, and huddling together on a street corner. When the two characters are pictured sitting on a couch, the dog’s eyes are open and stare aimlessly away from the scene, while the young woman’s eyes are closed. When they are pictured going for a walk together, the young woman strides confidently without a cane, her dog on a regular leash rather than the kind of harness one would associate with a service animal (although both prosthetic devices appear later in the book).

Expectations are reversed a third of the way through the narrative, when the narrator explains that while Lola prefers to eat fish, she craves red meat. The corresponding illustrations show the young woman standing in line at a fish truck while the dog tugs at the leash to reach the butcher. At this point it is clear that the “lonely and ill” character has actually been the human being all along and that the dog, Star, is the one telling the story. That Lola is blind becomes clear only in the last pages of the book, when the dog narrator reveals why Lola needs her. Significantly, on the page on which Lola’s blindness is revealed, there is no colour save for the white text against black background and a disembodied hand reaching into this empty blackness. Readers learn that after a car accident five years earlier, Lola came to a Guide Dogs Training School, and the two characters have been best friends ever since. Star explains that...