Why, in all of these stories about someone who wants to be something or someone else, was it always the individual who needed to change, and never the world?
Subtitled 'On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space', this is partly a memoir of the author's experience of cerebral palsy, and partly a survey of the ways in which fairytales 'other' people with disabilities, people who don't look right, people who are different. Sometimes fairytales depict outward disability / difference as a sign of inward wickedness, for example ugly stepsisters or a hunchbacked witch; in other stories, it's the result of a curse or a spell, and can be 'mended' by completion of a quest or a trial.
Leduc doesn't restrict her analysis to the tales popularised by the Brothers Grimm or Madame d'Aulnoy: she also examines the 'Disney princess' genre, and Marvel's superheroes -- for instance, Steve Rogers' disabilities pre-supersoldier serum. Blending her analysis with subjective personal experience and medical documentation sometimes sits oddly with the more scholarly discourse, but it also makes the book feel more personal.
This worked very well as an audiobook -- read by Amanda Barker -- though I kept wanting to highlight particular arguments or facts!
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