Jenny Valentine’s Broken Soup

A delicious, funny, touching love story of…well I won’t spoil it.  Big issues of course without the kind of whodunnit adventure of Finding Violet Park.

Alan Gibbons The Edge

Chris Kane (who is very Abel with his fists) is a violent monster (Frankenstein, Heathcliff) and is after his runaway partner and her son (by a previous partner).  It is a terrifyingly gripping suspense novel with a beautifully crafted racism subplot.  A local school is doing it as a Y7 class text!  Way to go!

Private Peaceful and Crowstarver – Disabled people in children’s/teenage fiction

N told me a while back about a class discussion she led on Big Joe in Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful which made me look at it again and DK-S’s Crowstarver.  Here’s Big Joe’s introduction in PP,

“…Mother told us when we were older that Big Joe had nearly died just a few days after he was born. Meningitis, they told her at the hospital. The doctor said Joe had brain damage, that he’d be no use to anyone, even if he lived. But Big Joe did live…As we were growing up, all we knew was that he was different. It didn’t matter to us that he couldn’t read or write at all, that he didn’t think like we did, like other people did. To us he was just Big Joe. He did frighten us sometimes. He seemed to drift off to live in a dream world of his own, often a world of a nightmares I thought because he could become very agitated and upset. But sooner or later he always came back to us and would be himself again, the Big Joe we all knew, the Big Joe who loved everything and everyone, especially animals and birds and flowers, totally trusting, always forgiving – even when he found out that hs sweets were rabbit droppings…”

In Dick King Smith’s Crowstarver there are problems with how some people react to Spider,
“…’Twas a bad day for the Sparrows when thik babbie were dumped on them. Why, if that had been a lamb as wasn’t right, born with a girt big head say and girt big tongue stickin’ out of its mouth – or got five legs or summat, well then Tom would have knocked ‘ee on the head, thees’t know. I bain’t saying he shoulda done to the babbie, but he ought to have let un fade away.’
‘Not for my money, Billy,’ said Ephraim the horseman. ‘ I reckon Tom done right’
‘And so do I’ said Percy Pound, and his voice was angry, ‘and I’m telling you all, here and now, you keep your mouths shut about that kid, especially you young uns. If I hear you’ve been poking fun so that Kath and Tom get to hear of it, you’ll get your cards, understand?’”

Neither Big Joe or Spider are allowed to go to school and they face many problems due to some people’s attitudes towards their learning difficulties throughout the stories. The books reflect the mixture of opinions towards disabled people, both accepting and negative, that are similar to those of today.  They are in some ways about how the community learns to ‘include’ both boys, how not to disable them.  Which sounds like the social model of disability to me.

In an editorial for Disability Now, Ian McRae writes,
“…At the risk of re-stating the totally bleedin’ obvious, it is society and the barriers it puts in our way that disable us, not our impairments. We are not, and can never be, “people with disabilities” because of the inescapable reality that we’re all disabled by the same discriminatory, unequal, disablist set of social barriers, attitudes and values. To call us something different is to further marginalise and ignore us…”

Radical children’s fiction then!!!

But do disable d people themselves have a voice in children’s books?  The ’service user’ movement aims to empower people who access government services (Health, Social Care etc) to design and control those services rather than simply ‘receive’ them. There’s a brilliant book by the ‘user-controlled’ organisation – People First Lambeth called ‘We are not stupid’ available for download at http://www.shapingourlives.org.uk/ourpubs.html which is written by people with learning difficulties about their lives, how they are and how they would like them to be.

Anyone know of examples of disabled people in kids’/teenage fiction, from their own perspective?

p.s.  There’s a brilliant teaching pack from Theatre Alibi on Crowstarver – http://www.crowstarver.com/educationpack.htm

Ian McRae’s editorial is at http://www.disabilitynow.org.uk/bad-language?searchterm=bad+lang