In honor of Disability Pride Month, I here are a few of my favorite books with disabled protagonists!
Among Others by Jo Walton - A gorgeous coming of age story about an isolated, science fiction obsessed girl in a welsh boarding school, the main character walks with a cane due to an devastating automobile accident that killed her twin sister. The book does a great job exploring how this impacts her life, along with all the other fallout of the accident and various dubiously fantastical incursions into her life. I love love love the story of the book itself, I read this well over a decade ago and it hass stuck with me so much.
Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson - A YA fantasy about an isolated young nun who must partner with a dangerous and misunderstood spirit to save everything she cares about. This is a book I underestimated when I started it, partially due to the YA marketing, but it blew me away! Regarding disability, the main character of this has severe burn scars that significantly impact her ability to use her hands, as well as a suite of old traumas to manage. I really appreciate how the book portrays that the burns consistently impact her life and make simple tasks difficult, but does so matter-of-factly and without it coming across as pitying her.
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - This one has TWO great main characters with disabilities and great writing about how their differing relationships to them. Din, the main character, is dyslexic and at first he is constantly trying to keep it under the table and hide it from his coworkers (and pulls off some incredible stuff to achieve this!) Across the book, his understanding of his capacities and his relationship to it evolves, in wonderful lockstep with his overall character arc. The other MC, Ana, is some flavor of on the autism spectrum and is living her absolute best life solving mysteries and making it everyone else's problem.
A House With Good Bones by T Kingfisher - This one is maybe a little more subtle, but Sam's hypothyroidism and weight are background elements that really shape the book! I love the wry humor she has about how the world treats fat people, she talks about it in a really refreshing way that stands in stark contrast to the subtle fatphobic tones that a lot of "body positivity" stuff has. Plus her thyroid condition plays into it too--she overtly doubts the horror elements happening to her because she's been conditioned to doubt her own body's reactions to things. I think that's interesting!
Silent Partner Unfinished Business - This is a fanfic, but I'm sneaking it on the list anyway because it's so good. It's a Death Note fic where Misora Naomi survives Light's attempted murder of her and then teams up with Misa to get his ass. Naomi ends up with both physical disability and expressive aphasia, meaning that while she can still understand everything just fine she is psychologically incapable of constructing language herself (can't speak or write in intelligible sentences.) The story is largely from her POV and does an amazing job showing the deep frustrations that come from living with this condition, as well as all the ways she finds to work with it and still be a stone cold bad ass.
Let me know what some of your favorite books with good disability rep are!