9 Awesome YA Books About Disabilities

This is a really popular book, so it almost needs no introduction. Percy and Monty are best friends who end up travelling Europe together; things are complicated by the fact that Monty is totally crushing on Percy, who has epilepsy.

Moira’s best friend, Nathan, is dead. And now she’s out of control. After she comes home with a tattoo, meaning she can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery, her parents ship her off to the Castle School: a deserted home on the coast of Maine for 12 ‘problematic’ girls who have nowhere else to go. But are they really as alone as they think?

Most of the girls there have a range of disorders, including anorexia, trichotillomania (hair pulling), and kleptomania.

After the death of her best friend, Piper developed selective mutism: a social anxiety disorder which means she often struggles to speak in front of people. Her supportive family have transferred her to a new school. There she meets West, the local golden boy, who seems to be falling in love with her…even though they haven’t exchanged a word.

Harper is a teenage girl living a highly stressful life in D.C. – her mother has cancer, her father’s abandoned the family, and her brother has become a gang enforcer in a desperate attempt to pay off their father’s debt. She also has cerebral palsy, which manifests itself in the form of a malformed leg. One night she’s kidnapped away to the fantasy land of Emberfall, ruled by the beastly Prince Rhen. His beauty-and-the-beast curse means that unless she falls in love with him, she’ll never be allowed to go home.

After she’s suspended from school for confronting a racist teacher, Zayneb travels to her aunt’s house in Qatar. There she meets Adam, who was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Just like her, he’s playing a role: Zayneb pretends to be a ‘nice’ girl, while he’s hiding his diagnosis from his father, who’s grieving the death of Adam’s mother from the same disease. Despite all the secrets and obstacles in their way, Adam and Zayneb are determined to be what each other needs.

After a car accident when she was younger, Sophie became addicted to opiates to drive away her chronic pain. She’s clean now – but when her girlfriend Mina is killed in what seems a drug deal gone wrong, everyone blames her. Sophie knows the truth: Mina was murdered. And she’s going to find the killer.

Agnes is blind, and her overprotective parents have a lot of rules for her. She’s never been on a date, never been out past 10:00, never done countless things her peers take for granted.

But then she becomes best friends with reckless Bo, the girl with a bad reputation. When Bo has to leave town in a hurry, Agnes comes with her. They steal a car, escape the police, and go on a wild road trip – losing, and finding, themselves in the process.

Madeline has SCID: severe combined immunodeficiency, meaning she’s pretty much allergic to everything. Her mother doesn’t let her leave the house or touch anything that hasn’t been sanitised to death. Then Olly moves in next door, and Madeline starts to question everything about her life.

Spoiler Below:

At the end you learn that Madeline doesn’t have SCID, but she does have myocarditis and a very underdeveloped immune system. She also operates during the whole book under the belief that she has SCID.

Macy is ‘disturbed’. At least, that’s the word her school uses to describe the psychological disorder that complicates her interactions with the people around her. But she’s more worried about all the problems she has to deal with right now. She’s a Black girl living in a ghetto, her dad is in prison, her mother is a prostitute, her sister is dead, and her brother has been taken away by Child Protective Services. Yet no matter how hard her life gets, she’s determined to survive…whatever it takes.