From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives by Abbye E. Meyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives by Abbye E. Meyer Megan Marshall (bio) From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families: The Power of Disability in Young Adult Narratives. By Abbye E. Meyer. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Historically, the disabled experience is not a prevalent subject in literature, and until relatively recently, memorable novels featuring nuanced protagonists with disabilities have been a rarity. More often, characters with disabilities have been misrepresented, treated as props for central characters, and/or existed as a series of one-dimensional tropes. While the same can be said when narrowing the focus to the relatively modern field of children's and young adult literature, Abbye E. Meyer's seven-chapter monograph From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families seeks to bring this conversation to the forefront. Citing the unique parallels between the disabled and adolescent experience, she offers critical discussion of several young adult novels and other texts to illustrate how narratives of disability written for (and about) young adults are a rich site for considering the intersections of literary and disability studies. Meyer's first chapter situates her work in both fields, pointing to a dearth of scholarship focused on representations of disability in literature, especially in relation to narratives that feature adolescent characters. She cites a handful of well-known canonical exemplars, naming texts and characters that represent the "unease" of adolescence and/or disability, noting that while these examples are not young adult literature (perhaps the closest being Alcott's Little Women, which was published in 1868, nearly a century before the true emergence of the field), they help to provide a framework for considering adolescent and/or disabled characters as troubled occupants of liminal spaces. Meyers builds on this by positioning young adult literary texts and the "problem novel" subgenre at the intersection of adolescence and disability, making the argument that this unique relationship has the potential to disrupt harmful tropes, change mainstream thinking about disability, and (perhaps most radically) forge a permanent and powerful connection between narratives of adolescence and disability. In the next chapter, "Wallflowers: Disability as the Young Adult Voice," Meyer builds her discussion around two prominent novels from the mid-twentieth century—The Bell Jar (Plath) and Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)—specifically, the quintessential "young adult voice" alongside "unmistakable symptoms of mental illness" in both Esther and Holden (13). She draws a parallel between these characters to those in more recent work, such as Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) and Leviathan's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist (2006), referring to commonalities in voice, concerns, and approaches to making sense of the world. Her analysis of [End Page 429] these texts posits that the narrator-protagonist voices of disabled and adolescent characters are inextricably linked, particularly regarding features of mental illness. The pattern for the next four chapters emerges in the third chapter, "Fruits: Disability as Literary Metaphor," where Meyer explains the literary tendency to depict the disabled experience as one synonymous with affliction and suffering. She points to the use of disabled characters as thematic devices, referencing M. T. Anderson's 2002 novel Feed, citing his treatment of disability to symbolize what is broken in society to critique the dangers inherent in corporate culture. The result is characters (and readers) being led to "prefer nondisabled identities" (38). In contrast, she highlights texts that complicate conceptions of disability by conflating it with adolescence, such as portrayed by the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides). Here, Meyer argues, the story structure is nuanced enough to allow for complex character development via the collective memory of the plural voice of the (now) adult men who serve as narrators. The fourth chapter centers on "Freaks"—particularly the ways they serve to foster growth and development in nondisabled characters. Meyer describes how visual differences invoke the label of monster or freak, which is capitalized upon in narratives where such characters are used for the development of other (nondisabled) characters. She contends that "freaks" are two-dimensional, existing primarily to elicit action and responses from more prominent characters and uses the well-known (and often-taught) 2012 novel Wonder (Palacio) to...