Books to Read This Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month, and The Bronx Is Reading wants to introduce you to books to help you celebrate it. These books all feature sensitive portrayals of characters with disabilities. Many are great choices for teaching kids more about disability and disability inclusion, and others tell compelling stories with nuanced characters.

Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You by Sonia Sotomayor and Illustrated by Rafael López

A New York Times #1 Bestseller, this book by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and award-winning artist Rafael López works through how to address and deal with feelings of being an outsider or different when you’re young, and how differences can be actually a positive and powerful thing.

Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly

Lynne Kelly’s Schneider Family Book Award-winning book follows twelve-year-old Iris. The only deaf person in her school and family, Iris struggles with feelings of isolation. But her life is changed when she learns about Blue 55 (inspired by the real life 52-hertz whale), a whale unable to communicate with other whales of his kind. Iris sets out to make a song for him, and on a journey to deliver it to him.

Show Me a Sign by Ann Clare LeZotte

Winner of the 2021 Schneider Family Award and an NPR, Kirkus, School Library Journal, and NYPL Best Book of 202, Le Zotte’s book tells the story of a flourishing deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1800s. The novel follows Mary, one of many deaf people on the island as she struggles to survive when the status quo is disrupted by a scientist who cruelly makes her a “specimen” in his research and takes ableism, colonialism, and racism head on.

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

One of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction of 2018! Hoang’s romance novel follows Stella Lane, who feels more comfortable writing algorithms than dating, and who also has Aspberger’s. But Stella’s mundane life is thrown for a loop by Michael, the escort she’s hired to teach her the ropes of romance.

Normal: One Kid’s Extraordinary Journey

This moving memoir tells the story of Nathaniel, born with TC syndrome, as told by Nathaniel himself and his mother combined with black and white comic illustrations. Normal follows Nathaniel as he takes on cross-country moves, undergoing 67 surgeries before the age of 15, making friends, and all the trials and tribulations of growing up.