Welcome to the Reader's Roundtable

edition of CADL Cast with Jessica Trotter, Mari Garza and Cheryl Lindemann.

Welcome back to the Reader's Roundtable edition of CADL Cast.

I'm Jessica Trotter and I'm joined by Cheryl Lindemann

and Mari Garza and we’re your primary selection team here at CADL.

I would have to say the topic of this Times

episode grew out of an internal and external discussion

of how hard it is to find and sometimes identify materials

by and featuring people with disabilities.

So we've done you know, we've done training within the staff and we've done

we've come up in different parts of the podcast, but we wanted to kind of

spend some time on some titles that we wanted people to know about.

Yeah, excellent.

Yeah.

We found that it's hard to find the materials.

The way that they're actually catalog.

The way that they come makes it tricky to search for them.

Sometimes they get lost in our collections and more and more,

while the publishing is lower in this area,

we're seeing more good titles and sometimes they get lost.

So we really wanted to put the spotlight on some today, and I'm going to start out

with one that I recommend absolutely everybody read.

It's called Demystifying Disability What to Know What to Say

and How to Be an Ally by Emily Liddell.

And this is an excellent primer.

Absolutely.

For anyone, for any adult or even a teen about people with disabilities.

I learned so much from this book and I thought that I knew

more than I really did until I read this book.

What I love about it, though, is it's very conversational, it's

warm, it's non shaming of the reader

for making any potential past mistakes, about talking about people disabilities.

It gives the reader tools to understand, you know, what

our disabilities, all the categories and some that people may

not even really have thought of as disabilities.

They will learn in this book what is included

and then how to talk about

how to talk about people with disabilities and how different communities

have different feelings about how to be addressed.

But it

also talks about the disability community, disability

rights and disability justice, which are all really in some ways

three different things, and introduces those topics to the reader.

It's really brief for what is covered and it's really beautifully written.

Just feels like she's sitting right there talking to you

and she's like, Hey, this is important.

Come, listen,

I'm not going to take that much of your time,

but I'm going to do it in a way

that you'll come away feeling like you can be an ally.

And one of the things I really took away from

this book was that disability is not the problem.

It's how often non-disabled people think of it

that, Oh, you know, it's too bad somebody has this disability.

It makes it so hard for them to live.

There's a lot of pride in the disability community

and what really comes across is that accommodation is the problem,

the way our society doesn't

accommodate people with physical and other disabilities.

And that's where the problem lies, not in the disability itself.

So to move on to the next book that I had,

this is a newer a new title from this year and it's called

Sam Super Seats by Kisha Brown and illustrated by Shari Miller.

And Sam Super Seats is really

a children's book version of the first essay of one of Kisha Brown's

other adult books called The Pretty One on Life, Pop

Culture, Disability and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me.

And this book is is truly delightful.

And this is a picture book based off of that.

And the idea of this book is that Sam has cerebral palsy,

but she also has a lot of self-love.

She has a lot of great friendships.

She has a wonderful family.

And so it's about self-esteem.

It's really about friendship, but it's also about her super seats.

And what does that mean?

It means places for her to sit down and rest.

So it's a book that embraces rest as something to not be ashamed of, to

frame rest

positively for people with disabilities and really for everyone.

So she has certain seats that are she actually names them.

They're her friends.

They they hold her in.

They help support her.

And the author, Kiya Brown, has her own seats.

And that's in that essay collection that I talked about.

And they support her in being a writer and being the woman that she is.

She also is the creator of the hashtag hashtag, disabled and cute.

So that can super seat spike here.

Brown Okay.

I'm going to talk about two that

both of them actually have been talked about in different places.

So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on it.

I want to double down on my recommendation from an earlier podcast.

We sort of actually talked about it being a lead in to this.

We knew we were going to be doing this.

I talked about deaf Utopia by now, debacle maybe two episodes ago.

It's a wonderful peek into deaf culture

from a really determined and accomplished model, actor and advocate.

I just I had been kind of

midway through it

when we last talked about it, I finished it.

It's really fabulous.

I think it could be somewhat underrated

by people who don't respect the

the the fact that he's come up through reality TV shows.

But he's just he's such a passionate advocate for deaf culture

and has such an interesting story that I really think people should give it a try.

But I also want to suggest it's hard being you.

A Primer on Being Happy Anyway by Sharon Emery.

This has come up on our on telecast, our director catalyst director Scott Dempster.

I interviewed her

in episode 57 of Capital Quest and we'll link to that in the show notes.

But it's a very local Greater Lansing, uh,

you know, Greater Lansing area vacationing on Lake Huron family.

But it's just a beautifully written memoir.

And it's maybe one of the best things I've read this year about

Emery, his lifelong stutter.

Um, she lost a sister to suicide.

She lost a child who drowned in Lake Huron.

She but she's also she's about

built a career in journalism and public relations and teaching.

She became a disability. Advocates served as a chair

of the Michigan Disability Rights Coalition Board.

And, you know, if you need more context than that, she's

the wife of a longtime Lansing State Journal columnist, Dan Schneider,

and the mother of Ben Schneider, who is the of Lord Huron.

So, I mean, it's very local and it's just a very moving,

interesting story and it's just beautifully written.

So just want everybody to give that one a try as well.

And check out the interview with Scott because it was very, very good.

Awesome.

Okay. All right.

So I have a middle grade fiction title,

which is actually fairly kind of chunky, meaning it's over 300 pages long.

It is called Hair Me by Keri O'Malley.

Sarah.

Sarah is a teacher in Florida and I'm not quite sure if she is

part of the hearing loss community, but this is a book about a child.

Raine, 12 years old, who is experiencing progressive hearing loss.

And it's kind of the story of,

you know, her parents

who really have firmly in their mind what they need to do to get her

to not be experiencing this, which includes a fairly invasive

surgery of getting cochlear

implants, cochlear implants and

brain feeling like I will wait a minute.

I don't know if I want to do this

because she already has hearing aids that sort of work

for now anyway.

And she you know, the book kind of opens up with her

being tested yet again and what she calls like this metal box.

And it was really interesting, like just observing.

I mean, as I'm reading through the book, like how rain

as compensated waiting and trying so hard

to hide the extent of her hearing loss because she really doesn't want to go down

that road of treatment with the surgery and,

you know, trying to fool the

the technicians or the therapists, those who are conducting these tests on her,

and then also finding a little bit of an ally with the doctor

who was like, wait, you know, that might not be the best route to go

because the doctor is really trying to encourage

Raine's mom to consider, you know, waiting a bit

because technology is changing so much and treatments are coming up.

So anyway, it's a it's a bit of an adventure in that.

Raine Eventually,

you know, goes off on this, this journey

to see if she can find some other experimental therapies.

And you can also tell that she is, you know, coming to terms

with this is who I am, this is what it's like.

There would be nothing wrong with going to ask school for deaf children.

It's really, really interesting.

But also it made me think a lot about, you know, just

the autonomy that even a child has a say, being able to

to speak for what you want for your your future, your body.

Just really, really interesting.

So I hope you'll pick that up.

Hear me by Kerry O'Malley.

Sarah

made me think a little bit about parts of Al Dufault, the graphic novel.

You know, mother was getting a chapter especially because.

Other right.

Definitely these testing

yeah apparatuses you know.

And it's it's an interesting contrast to deaf utopia

because him being from a multi generally generational deaf family.

Yeah, he.

Can see that happening with other families, but it's not there

where they get sort of the

to say interference quite but

they're getting it from outside of the family doctors

who are like maybe you can do this or that sort of thing.

Whereas for them this is who they are, right?

Where he can see in other families, you know,

where it's the first person in the family who is deaf.

Sure. It's a very different.

Yeah. Approach.

Yeah, I am not a parent, but you could also you could just see like, you know,

a parent wants they experience fear for their child physically.

They think they will get the best education or that their future

will somehow be dimmed if if they don't do what they think is, is best.

And you could see that. Yeah.

And then you get the other side of Niles.

Mother is one of those people who's like, no, really they can have a

she would go in to the deaf school and actually work with the parents.

When she.

When they would let her.

Yeah. To say no it can be okay.

We just need to support them and let them learn and.

Right. Yeah.

So it's really getting these different views is really interesting.

Yeah, I feel like that ties back to demystifying disability

because one of the other points

that comes through is that there is not one disability experience.

Even within a community, there can be different feelings

about being called a person with autism or an autistic person or neurodiverse

or some people still use Asperger's even though it's not in the DSM.

I mean, there's so much variety and to continue to learn and ask people,

even those uncomfortable about their own experience

and how they want to be identified or how they're feeling about it.

Yeah, yeah.

That really brings me into my

next book, which is called The Electricity of Every Living Thing

A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home by Catherine Mae.

And this was a memoir that was released late last year.

I think it was out November.

So it kind of got lost in that end of the year shuffle.

And Catherine Mae, a year prior had written Wintering,

which was a wonderful essay or essay type collection, very poetic, about winter,

about cold, about the northern lights, winter swimming,

just this beautiful examination of of life in the cold.

And it was very popular.

And this book, I really want to read it because I enjoyed that other book.

But this book is about a journey that she decided

to take one year to walk the southwest coast path in England.

And this is a path that goes from Somerset to Dorset.

And it's rocky, it has steep cliffs.

It's up and down and up and down.

It's rough going.

She's not doing it all in one stretch.

She's going there.

Know her husband and son go with her.

They might stay nearby.

They drop her off and she journeys sometimes with a friend, but often alone.

And it's this journey trying to kind of back to herself,

because around that time she heard a new story by an adult

who had a late adult diagnosis of autism.

And the story she hear is that, okay?

Well, she's walking and she starts thinking about

she cannot let the story go.

And she realizes that she identifies with a lot of the things

that were talked about in the interview.

And so she goes back on this sort of mental journey, looking at herself

and saying, Oh, my gosh, could I be on the autism spectrum?

What does that mean?

And so she ends up getting by the end of diagnosis,

but it's really that journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance

as she's walking in these beautiful and sometimes severe landscapes.

But I thought this was an excellent book because it is about later

diagnosis of autism spectrum

disorder and neurodiverse diagnosis.

And that's something that you do hear about, especially in women.

She was 38 years old and often

that diagnosis is that aha moment.

It pulls together

some of the challenges that

once had in their life up to that point and helps them realize themselves better.

And you do hear about that more,

especially in women, because it's harder to diagnose.

Also, ADHD is something that goes as less diagnosed in women as well

so the electricity of every living thing by Cathryn.

May I highly recommend this book?

Okay.

I have a cozy, but it's a little different.

It's Aria Winters and the Tiramisu of Death by Amita Murray.

This is a serious view. It's

a kind of a millennial play on the English Village Mystery.

It features Michael Baker Aria Winters.

She's recently inherited her aunt's cottage in a small village.

And she

she runs her business out of the home and avoids her neighbors

as much as possible to an extreme social anxiety.

Excuse me,

but she did kind

of like her neighbor, Tobias, who unfortunately turns up dead

from poison tiramisu, which wasn't that way when she made it.

So luckily, right off the bat, she's not actually a suspect.

It's actually her ex-boyfriend, Tobias, his nephew.

She kind of again, she has

a variety of issues and she knows she has a variety of issues.

She doesn't really want to deal with people because she doesn't want to

those issues to make me worse.

But she had been watching her ex-boyfriend,

so she knows he didn't kill her to kill Tobias.

I mean, in the period that they think it happened.

So but she doesn't actually want to tell

anybody that she had been watching her ex-boyfriend at the time.

So there is a thing right there.

But it the case and kind of the things that are kind of popping up out of it

as she kind of looks into it, is that it also makes her think

that there's more to her aunt's death than she realized then.

That really makes her dig in and start doing some research.

So definitely kind of extreme social anxiety,

but she

kind of decides she's going to try and work around it

to nose around on this case.

But she also, as you go through the story, never explicitly says anything

more than social anxiety, but it displays she presents

as a Tourette's type

outburst. And that's it.

It gets worse.

The more anxious she gets, the less she can control.

So there's a lot kind of going on in that sense.

You don't get all of her story in this first book.

There's a lot to do with her parents and her.

It's in her background.

And you get you meet some of the people she knew

in earlier in life.

But you

it's it's it's a cute story in its own way.

There's of course I love interest there is a lot of just

it really is sort of the play on the

she runs into everybody every time she walks out of them

walks out of her house like, I don't want to run into anybody.

And she runs into everybody as she's walking down the street in town.

And it's just the first of a series.

The next one actually is coming out in November.

It's called Aria Winters and the Deadly Cupcakes.

So the first one again is Aria Winters and the Tiramisu of Death.

And the cover is really delicious.

It is Josie's even though is death tiramisu.

Not so much to me.

So I don't know.

Sounds like a good weekend. Go.

Oh, there's a point in the story where see the kind of romantic interest she.

He's done something nice for her and she's like,

she puts a box of cupcakes on his doorstep and says, basically,

I mean, here, of

course, then again, he's the last person that gave something to his dad.

P.S. Don't eat this.

That the stickers broken.

So it's.

Funny. It's funny.

Okay, well, I do have a couple more books.

The first one is actually a nonfiction book.

It's pretty standard

understanding dyslexia

for Jessica by Jessica Resnick.

And it's, I would say maybe for second

to fourth grade reading level very informative mean it starts out with

you know a kind of a day and you know, slice of life

day in the life of maybe a child.

You know, Kai copies the quiz questions from the board into his notebook.

He finishes copying, he looks around and he's recognized

that a lot of his classmates have already turned in the quizzes.

So he has trouble reading and he has trouble writing.

Also, at the same pace that some of his classmates do,

his what comes out is that Kai has dyslexia.

So the following pages are really a description of what is dyslexia,

what can children do

to work around that in order to

read or have understanding?

A lot of children with dyslexia not only are, you know,

working to, you know, with fonts and different things to to improve that.

But they're also listening to a lot of books, which is a perfectly acceptable way

of taking in content and, you know, stories and information.

So I really liked it.

It's part of a series on disabilities.

It's kind of written.

I think, for the person who is not dyslexic, but either

or you could really get a lot out of understanding of the book.

And one of the things I really liked as as is often the case

in a lot of the nonfiction books is you get a really nice index

and a nice glossary of what the terms mean.

And again, that that I guess

encouragement to not think that not just do something

for someone because you think it's the nice thing to do.

Always ask someone if they need help.

If you can help, you know, they, they might not need your help at all.

So the other title I have is also related to dyslexia.

This is actually a novel verse

called Slipping Forward,

Twisting Backward by Alma Fullerton.

And I just noticed on the cover that the D is backward,

backward or flipped, I guess you could say

this is about a fifth grader who's an absolutely stunner gymnast.

She does a handstand like nobody's business.

She's like the top gymnast in her in her, I guess, local gym

and she knows that she struggles with reading.

And for a long time she's just thought, I'm stupid, I don't do well.

And she has a classmate who has been covering for her for quite some time.

And her one of the I don't know if it's her teacher or maybe her

one of the principals in the school recognizes this and alerts

the mom, hey, I think, you know,

Claire might be, you know, needing some testing and the mom is so resistant.

So, again, it's kind of that story of a parent who doesn't

who thinks that, oh, my, my child will be labeled.

I don't want that at all. No, let's just avoid that.

I really liked how, you know, there was just this message of like,

go for it, get get any support that you need

in order to take in your education.

So I highly recommend this is a very quick read novel was

excellent.

And that's our titles for today, right?

This is a really fun and interesting topic to dig in on, too.

And we have a

we've it's been interesting.

Again, it's there's still not nearly as much published as we would like to see,

but there is more and better material coming out all the time.

So that's great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.