Reviews with content warning for Medical trauma - Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“I have nothing to prove to the world because the world has everything to prove to me. It is the world's responsibility to make space for my body, my words, my lopsided gait - our bodies, our words, our ways of moving through the world - to hold my childhood dreams of being a princess and a superhero close and help me understand that there is no need to want to be either. To start telling different stories about a body that might just look like mine, and reshaping the world to fit them. I am already enough. There is no need to be more.” - Amanda Leduc.

Discussing the portrayals of disability in fairy tales throughout history and how those representations influenced the people and world around them, this nonfiction book was informative and is one I definitely recommend! I also highly recommend picking up more books like this afterward to continue learning such as Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong! TWs for ableism, abuse, body horror, bullying, cancer, chronic illness, depression, gun violence, incest, medical content, mental illness, rape, and suicidal thoughts📚🌹🗡🧜👨‍🦽🦻

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emilia_digi's review

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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reallife_kazbrekker's review

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emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

First 5 star book of the year folks! Only took 4 months...

But anyway, I really enjoyed this book! It gave me a ton of new information which I loved, but it also had some very hard hitting sentences.
As a disabled person myself, I knew this book was gonna be a bit difficult to read at times, because it would hit close to home, but I really underestimated just how hard some of these sentences would hit me... I'm really glad that I read it tho, despite how difficult it was at times.

I highly recommend this book to anyone, especially abled bodied people.

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armontheroad's review

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

3.0

Let me preface by saying this is a very important book and I would still recommend it to people. With that said, after debating for weeks about my rating for this book, I have settled on a 3-star rating. Throughout a good portion of this book, I was SURE that this would be a 4-star read. I had taken a star off, knocking it to a four, because of Amanda Leduc’s use of Male/Female terminology. Even in instances where it was literally impossible for Leduc to know someone’s biological sex, she boiled them down to their genitals. It was bizarre and highly uncomfortable reading as a Disabled trans person. What made the rating drop down to a three was the reference and praise of a known transphobic ableist author whose views have passed laws that have caused harm to many marginalized individuals. I think this book was well written, well researched, and very engaging. I loved the conversations about how deeply rooted ableism is in our society. I adored the balance between the memoir-ish sections and dissecting ableism in fairytales. I do think this has the potential to do lots of good. However, I must also acknowledge that this book does lots of harm to marginalized communities as well.

CWs/TWs: Stillborn, medical content, ableism, child death, murder, rape, hate crime, bullying, TERF language, harry potter reference, depression, suicidal ideation, mass shooting, gun violence, etc.

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