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A review by korrick
April Witch by Majgull Axelsson
1.0
I posted a comment on the only review worth reading of Me Before You about how people saying the work was acceptable representation of disabled people needed to find twenty other works that featured disabled people in prominent character positions and see how the results laid out. Did they live? Did they die? Were they similarly pressed to save the neurotypical and/or abled people the trouble of taking out the trash in order to make for a tearjerker conclusion for the myriad eugenishits in the general reading population? Before such a critical analysis is conducted by those who'd rather have others die for their sins and their sob stories, I'll have to trust in the fact that when I google "best countries for those with mental illnesses", I don't get confidential communities or a public conference aimed at reducing stigma or classes required at high school level alongside the customary sex ed, but which countries make it the easiest for crazy people to kill themselves. Fuck you if that's how you think. Fuck you if you think 'Me Before You' is excusable for your entitled reader numbfuckery. Fuck you if you'd rather call evil psychopathic rather than sadistic, as if successful biology had any interest in maintenance of ethics and your good widdle chemicals guaranteed you personally were on the straight and narrow.
This book wasn't as explicitly as disabled-person-dies-for-able-person-because-that's-what-disabled-people-are-good-for, but for a work centered around a woman with multiple severe physical and mental disabilities, it did a shit job of deconstructing the stigma surrounding such a person and the disability community at large. Some people like watching shitty people be shitty to other people for 400+ pages, but for those of us who know exactly how that shittiness is going to fuck us over outside the pages, treating it like entertainment is going to get us assaulted. The fact that women were the main movers in the plot just expanded the playing field for playing out various ableist and gynephobic tropes that are at an incompetent writer's disposal. The psycho mother. The wh*rphobic wh*re. The doctor who'll treat the disabled with respect so long as they're cute. Or amusing. Or can do neat tricks with calculus. Or sit still and willingly let themselves play along with the inspiration porn. It didn't help that all the characters bled into each other as happens with underdeveloped writing, or that particular traits in the present narrative train didn't show up until the appropriate flashback had occurred, or that the whole magical conspiracy was trite and self-absorbed and abusive as only white femininity can be. And then, a happy ending, as if the lot of these people hadn't spent the entire time loathing and/or avoiding and/or dehumanizing each other for decades on end? History can give you many examples of family ties not doing much in the fact of one sibling slaughter the other. The fact that this conclusion only comes about after the disabled person willingly goes under is only a coincidence, I'm sure.
The fact that this author's first book was sensationalist nonfiction makes me think she got such a kick out of writing about social taboos and other regularly dehumanized members of society that she just had to try her hand at fiction. It makes me glad that I don't care anymore about the feelings of people who fill my news feed with their oh so subtle thinking that people like me should recognize when they've hit their socially sanctioned expiration date. I'll continue to keep my eye out for books where disabled people are the star of the show, but if the author writing them isn't actually disabled, it'll probably only result in more excisions of my friend list.
This book wasn't as explicitly as disabled-person-dies-for-able-person-because-that's-what-disabled-people-are-good-for, but for a work centered around a woman with multiple severe physical and mental disabilities, it did a shit job of deconstructing the stigma surrounding such a person and the disability community at large. Some people like watching shitty people be shitty to other people for 400+ pages, but for those of us who know exactly how that shittiness is going to fuck us over outside the pages, treating it like entertainment is going to get us assaulted. The fact that women were the main movers in the plot just expanded the playing field for playing out various ableist and gynephobic tropes that are at an incompetent writer's disposal. The psycho mother. The wh*rphobic wh*re. The doctor who'll treat the disabled with respect so long as they're cute. Or amusing. Or can do neat tricks with calculus. Or sit still and willingly let themselves play along with the inspiration porn. It didn't help that all the characters bled into each other as happens with underdeveloped writing, or that particular traits in the present narrative train didn't show up until the appropriate flashback had occurred, or that the whole magical conspiracy was trite and self-absorbed and abusive as only white femininity can be. And then, a happy ending, as if the lot of these people hadn't spent the entire time loathing and/or avoiding and/or dehumanizing each other for decades on end? History can give you many examples of family ties not doing much in the fact of one sibling slaughter the other. The fact that this conclusion only comes about after the disabled person willingly goes under is only a coincidence, I'm sure.
The fact that this author's first book was sensationalist nonfiction makes me think she got such a kick out of writing about social taboos and other regularly dehumanized members of society that she just had to try her hand at fiction. It makes me glad that I don't care anymore about the feelings of people who fill my news feed with their oh so subtle thinking that people like me should recognize when they've hit their socially sanctioned expiration date. I'll continue to keep my eye out for books where disabled people are the star of the show, but if the author writing them isn't actually disabled, it'll probably only result in more excisions of my friend list.