Disfigured is reviewed in The Globe and Mail (paywall).
As Leduc takes us through these fairy tales and the space they occupy in the narratives that we construct, she slowly unfolds a call-to-action: the claiming of space for disability in storytelling. To challenge ourselves to tell stories in which the “princess or the childless parent or the half-human boy says, ‘Why should I be like everyone else?’ ”
K. J. Aiello, The Globe and Mail
Krista Foss chats with me about Disfigured and The Centaur’s Wife on Work In Progress. (TL;DR: working on two books at the same time is very magical and also Very Much A Bad Idea.)
Profile of Yours Truly (again!) in The Toronto Star.
Leduc is open with details from her own life, some of which are painful, including childhood bullying and her diagnosis with a major depressive disorder. For years she resisted identifying as disabled, and writes about how long it took her to connect the traumas she experienced to her disability.
Sue Carter, Toronto Star
Disfigured gets a starred review in Library Journal.
Leduc (The Miracles of Ordinary Men), a Canadian writer with cerebral palsy, has penned a remarkable exploration into the ways disability has been portrayed in fairy tales and, consequently, how those portrayals have shaped society’s treatment of the disabled. Referencing her own experiences, as well as those of other disabled writers and activists, Leduc shows how disabled children search for positive representation in fairy tales and other media, only to encounter depictions of disability as something to be pitied, feared, or corrected. In popular tales such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Snow White,” disability is either removed by magic or remains as a punishment for the wicked.
Sara Shreve, Library Journal
Profile of Yours Truly, complete with Very Cool Illustration, in Quill & Quire.
As a child, Amanda Leduc would pretend to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid, searching for lost treasures in the Leduc family swimming pool. “Ariel, of course, gained her legs by magic,” she writes in her new book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, to be published in February as part of Coach House Books’s Exploded Views series. “I gained my legs by the decidedly less romantic practicalities of orthopaedic surgery, practicalities which left me with a limp that wouldn’t go away.”
Quill and Quire