“There is no more dancing for me. There’s just the memory of how it felt when my body still did everything I wanted it to. I’m not even an adult yet – I’m not ready to lower my expectations and accept that I can’t do all the things I used to. I haven’t had enough time.” Sixteen-year-old Ven is still coming to terms with the chronic illness and disability that has put an end to her dancing and means that some days, even walking presents a difficulty. The only support group available is full of elderly people moaning, and when she’s dealing with a particularly bad dislocation (“You do not want to know my personal best for consecutive dislocations”), doctors tend not to be familiar with her condition or trust her own assessment of the situation.
Alexia Casale’s Sing If You Can’t Dance (Faber, £8.99) provides a nuanced exploration of coming to terms with a changed life, and, as the title suggests, Ven finds an alternative outlet for her love of music in joining the singing club at school. Hopeful yet didactic in the style of a Victorian morality tale, yes? But Ven is no simpering invalid, nor does her pluck and determination mean she can “overcome” her chronic mobility issues through sheer willpower. Instead she is complicated, a teenager who is well aware that not everyone likes her.
“I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea because some people are unreasonable morons,” she reflects when she’s trying to organise the singing club’s coursework-related performance, “but I’ll never understand why so many prefer to hate me over letting me make everything better”. And while it is true that Ven has great ideas and experience with such things thanks to her involvement in an annual festival, she is also impatient and prickly and inconsiderate at times.
It’s this, and the reality of how much behind-the-scenes work goes into a musical performance (it is not, Ven points out, like Pitch Perfect), that makes the hopeful ending feel genuinely earned and authentic. Ven is a memorable heroine – I would say “inspirational” but I fear she would rise from the pages to roll her eyes and point out that she does not exist to make anyone else feel better about themselves, thank you very much.
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Children’s author and illustrator Jarrett J Krosoczka first delved into his own personal experience with the highly-acclaimed Hey, Kiddo in 2019, which used the graphic novel format to depict a childhood and adolescence impacted by his mother’s addiction. Sunshine (Scholastic Graphix, £10.99) is a follow-up, in which young Jarrett, now living with his grandparents, is taking part in a volunteer programme at school. With five of his classmates, he’s off to a camp for sick, often dying, children and their families.
The subtitle – How One Camp Taught Me About Life, Death and Hope – may feel a little earnest for more cynical teenage readers, but by the time Jarrett reflects that, “No matter how much we had put into that week at camp, we all got so much more out of it”, they will probably be convinced it is earned. One of the strengths of this memoir is its depiction of all sides of the children they’re working with: Jarrett notes how at camp these kids with bald heads or wheelchairs are “the mainstream kids” rather than singled out for their difference. It’s a space for them to be “normal”, and this is shown in sequences where games are played or the teenagers learn “just how stressful it is to roast marshmallows with kids”.
But it’s also a space for them to share with others who “get it”, late at night in the shadows; the campers share stories about the impact of their illness and its treatment. “I’ve lost too many of my friends in hospital,” one says. “Not gonna lie, that’s why I don’t want to make friends with any of the new kids.” Sentimentality is avoided in favour of honesty: another spot-on detail occurs when the teen group is welcomed over-enthusiastically and they mutter about how “corny” it is, and Jarrett – while agreeing with them – realises he should probably join in on the “adult” side. The intensity of a summer camp experience is depicted skilfully, and a reminder of the benefits of helping others is particularly valuable in our bleak late-capitalist society.
Writer Jessica Walton and artist Aśka use this same graphic novel format to great effect in Stars in Their Eyes (Scholastic Graphix, £12.99), a cute and hopeful story about young teenagers at a fan convention. Maisie is there with her mom, and aware she will sometimes need an extra bit of help between residual pain from her leg amputation and the potential panic attacks from the crowds. But she’s determined to meet her heroine, an actor who shares her disability and stars in one of the many science-fiction shows she is obsessed with. (The allusions to particular franchises are not particularly subtle but pleasing nonetheless.)
“I wish there were more disabled characters in every show,” Maisie muses. Some of the discussion about representation and its importance is not particularly nuanced, but it serves as a useful entry point into these issues. More adorable is the mutual crush-at-first-sight that develops between Maisie and the young volunteer Ollie, and the realistic, endearing portrayal of how a shared fandom can lead to meaningful connections with others.
In 1924, 16-year-old Panther is working on a romance novel to keep herself occupied while her family live in genteel poverty. “I am yet to settle on a hero, though. I cannot decide if he should be foreign and unable to communicate except through the language of love, or a high-ranking army officer who went mute in the war (which he almost single-handedly won) and is now unable to communicate except through the language of love.” It is also an escape from the antics of her family, including whatever has her elder sister Aster in a sulk and whichever creature her younger sister Marigold has brought home.
Joanna Nadin’s A Calamity of Mannerings (UCLan Publishing, £8.99) is a warm and witty novel with nods to the Mitfords, Austen and others; it is also sharply feminist. “It is hopeless being a woman born to this class,” Panther notes. “We are lucky enough to be educated out of the realms of the manual but then expressly forbidden the roles to which we might aspire.” Their grandmother, determined to see the girls married off safely but despairing that any man might take them on, provides both conflict and humour; she reads the newspapers so she knows “who to be disgusted with”. This is delightful escapism even as it acknowledges several taboos; a gorgeous summer treat.
The past – in this case late 18th-century France – also serves as a backdrop in Jamie Lilac’s Bellegarde (Atom, £8.99), though not much else; both the characters and dialogue are decidedly 21st century, as though an American high school has been dropped into the centre of pre-revolutionary Paris. This is a light, fun retelling of She’s All That (itself a modern imagining of Pygmalion) in pretty costumes; serious history lovers should probably give it a miss.
