An important collection of stories about teens with a range of disabilities. Anthologies aren't usually my thing but I appreciated seeing disabled teens treated with respect.

This book is an anthology featuring authors with differing abilities. Many of these differing abilities are invisible- such as Crohn's disease , autism, etc. The message that these "dis" -abilities have not broken those featured is strong.

Along with books featuring non-white or LGBT characters, books containing characters with disabilities are more likely to be challenged or banned, which is sad because it prevents the books from getting into the hands of children and teens who need them most. I love the idea of this short story collection: books about characters with disabilities written by #OwnVoices authors with disabilities. I wish this collection had more contemporary stories and information about disabilities presented in the collection. However, I will continue to champion this book and others like it. My average rating for the stories was 2.46 stars.

Different authors, different themes, different genres, Some didn't really work for me, some I loved. That's just the way anthologies go, some i love, some I honestly don't care for at all. But its all good I still enjoyed it. And would recommend to the proper audience. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review*

I’ve definitely read more short story collections in 2018 than in previous years, and while I’ve found some great new authors I’m excited to read more from, I’ve also realized how long it takes me to read short story collections and I rarely love them. Unfortunately, such was the case with Unbroken edited by Marieke Nijkamp, which includes 13 stories featuring disabled teens.

I reviewed each of these stories as I read them (you can find that here) so I won’t go into too much detail, but basically, there were ones I liked, ones I didn’t care for, but mostly I didn’t have an emotional connection to the stories, it just felt like I was being told things. As a result, overall it was just an okay collection. That said, my favourites were Dhonielle Clayton and Corinne Duyvis. I didn’t expect Unbroken to be such a mix across genres (contemporary, science fiction, etc) so that was interesting, and a great reminder that diverse characters can feature in any story, but I think I just prefer to stay immersed in one story, or at least one genre. I don’t know, I wanted to like Unbroken better than I did, but at least I found a couple authors I am interested in reading more from.

Unbroken is a collection of short stories about teens with a variety of disabilities written by autors who also have disabilities. There's a good amount of diversity represented here too. Most of them are good, but I did find myself losing interest a little bit in the middle of the book. It might just be me, but in some of the stories it wasn't quite clear what the disability was.
My favorites were "The Leap and the Fall" by Kayla Whaley and "One, Two, Three" by Corinne Duyvis (It's called "A Curse, A Kindness" in the official version.) I'll be checking out more of their work.
I received my copy for free from NetGalley but all opinions are my own. I would recommend this book to teens with disabilities, anyone who wants to diversify their reading and people who like short story collections.

To be as upfront and transparent as possible, I feel it's important to state that I expected all of these stories to contain characters that lived with physical disabilities. While there are some that include characters like this, most of them were about characters with, what I would call, mental illness. Obviously my idea of a disability isn't the same as someone else's. Not that mental illness isn't an important topic that needs to be discussed. But, moving on.

Like most anthologies, I enjoyed some stories far more than others. Sometimes the "disability" was discussed in such a way to leave me confused as to what it was. I think this is an important work. And while it has areas that are definitely in need of content revision, it says a lot that we're publishing works like this. It's a step in the right direction. Some of these stories deserve to be a novel, and I would jump on the chance to read more. Overall, though, I'd have to give this a 3.5. 

Stefanie Rae

Excellent variety of stories full of empathy that don't shy away from hard truths or thoughts. I was impressed to see the different conditions represented.

so dang glad books like this exist. just like most works like this, parts of it were amazing to me, others not as great. not each story is as strong as the others, but that's kinda of what you get with anthologies.

Whereas there were a few gems in here, the collection was mostly a "miss" for me. Most of the stories felt too abrupt to me, and so I was disappointed to have such a jarring experience reading them.

However, I'm glad this collection exists, and I will definitely recommend it to other teachers to include in their classroom libraries. I think the wonderful thing about short stories is that there's a wide range of genres represented, and they often make students want to read full-length novels by the authors.

A gread mix of stories! Intersectional on so many axes, and a wide variety of genre. A great choice to hand your kids who are still thirsty for Wonder readalikes.

ARC provided by Netgalley and the publisher.

This was diverse. It was intersectional. It was an Own Voices collection. And it was great to read stories where individuals with disabilities are portrayed positively and actively and normally.

As with any short story collection, some stories will be more engaging to certain readers than others. (One of the things that makes these hard to shop during Reader’s advisory interactions.) For me, someone who lives daily with a fairly severe healing impairment (and never gets a great HH or deaf character in a book because they are always written by hearing authors) really missed that in this anthology.

This is going to speak to a certain population of teen readers. It’s going to make a difference. And it’s a strong short story collection to add to a Teen or YA library collection

I did receive a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

This was a really unique book! I've never read anything quite like it. Listed below is my rating of each individual short story.

Long road: 4
Britt and the Bike God: 4
The Leap and the Fall: 2
Per Aspera Ad Astra: 5
Found Objects: 1
Plus One: 3
The Day the Dragon Came: 4
Captain, My Captain: 3
Dear Nora James, You Know Nothing About Love: 4
A Play in Many Parts: 4
Ballad of Weary Daughters: 3
Mother Nature’s Youngest Daughter: 4
One, Two, Three: 4

The overall average of these ratings is close to 3.46. There were some books in here that I really enjoyed and one that I couldn't even stand to finish. Per Aspera Ad Astra was definitely my favorite. It featured a brilliantly smart girl locked inside her own head because of her anxiety. I loved reading about her struggle to overcome this mental disorder in an effort to save her family and city. I can't recall any swearing in this short story either, unlike in The Leap and the Fall, Found Objects, and Ballad of Weary Daughters. The swearing really took away from the stories and distracted me as a reader from the messages the authors were trying to get across. I couldn't even stand to finish Found Objects, it was told from such a weird viewpoint and I disliked the characters so much. I read about a third of it before skipping to the next book. Mother Nature's Youngest Daughter also had fantasy elements incorporated into it, yet this story had likable characters and a cool story line that kept me hooked. The Day the Dragon Came was also a good read. The only thing I didn't like about it was that the author never outright said the cause of her physical disability. Maybe it was hinted at somewhere, but I felt like this book and so many of the other ones would have been better if at some point the character's disability was written out so that the reader wouldn't have to guess what it was. One thing I did like about this book was that one of the characters was transgender. At least I think they were. It was vaguely hinted at in one line and I could completely have read it wrong, but if they were than cool! Many of these stories featured characters that were homosexual as well which made for an interesting viewpoint. Overall I enjoyed this book, some stories more than others. I would recommend it to a friend if asked.

As with most anthologies, it's a little hard to review them. Different authors, different themes, different genres. Some didn't really work for me, some I loved. Some were very moving, some bored me. Overall, I liked the anthology. I liked that it was own voices and I appreciated getting glimpses into lives with different challenges, things I may not be familiar with in my own experience. I think it's excellent that this book exists. I hope a lot of people read it. Broadening your own horizons and viewpoint of how others deal with the world around us can only be good. It's always a good thing to try to understand each other better. So, I think I'll give it 3 stars for the actual stories, some that touched me, some that didn't. And an extra star for seeing things from different perspectives and appreciating people for who they are.

Anthologies are pretty hit or miss for me. I usually like about half of the stories while not caring for the other half. This anthology was no different. I did, however, enjoy how diverse the stories were, not only in characters but in format and genre. There were definitely stories that I wish were longer. My favorites included: The Long Road by Heidi Heilig, The Leap and the Fall by Kayla Whaley, Captain, My Captain by Francisco X. Stork, and A Curse, A Kindness by Corinne Duyvis.
I received an ARC of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This anthology is a mix of contemporary fiction, fantasy and science fiction in a way that flows beautifully. Each of the 13 stories in the Unbroken anthology tells the story of a disabled person saving the world and living their lives the best they can.

Unbroken was an anthology I needed to read this week. All of these stories are written by ownvoices disabled authors, which is great. I loved that there was a variety of disabilities included, ranging from blindness to chronic pain to needing a power wheelchair to Bipolar II to autism. With its collection of bestselling authors like Heidi Heilig and Kody Keplinger, and some newer voices, I think this collection is stellar.

I received an eARC of Unbroken via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
It does need a general trigger warning for ableism throughout all of the stories. I’ll mention more specific warnings for each story I talk about. There was only one story that didn’t work for me, and that was because it was written as a play. There were several stories with a romantic subplot between two women, which was a wonderful surprise.

I’m going to talk a little bit about my favorite stories in the anthology.

Karuna Riazi’s Plus One tells the story of Hafsah, who refers to her major anxiety as “It.” She gets chosen to go on a pilgrimage to Hajj, and I loved the inclusion of how she desperately wanted It to go away with Allah’s help. It’s something that religious readers will be familiar with

Keah Brown’s Mother Nature’s Youngest Daughter dealt with a lot of ableist bullying towards a main character with cerebral palsy. It also allows her to get her revenge on her bullies in a way that didn’t harm anyone. I would love to see more exploration into this universe, or stories about her other siblings.

Kayla Whaley’s The Leap and the Fall was a mix of a horror story and a romance. The main character, like the author, uses a power wheelchair, and she uses it to her advantage. This is the first fiction story I’ve read by Whaley, and I cannot wait to see what she puts out next! This needs trigger warnings for possession, fire, and creepy circuses.

Corinne Duyvis’s A Curse, A Kindness featured an autistic main character who is cursed to grant three wishes to anyone who shows her a kindness. This sucks massively, because she meets the other main character when they literally run into each other in the grocery store. Sienna, our cursed MC, drops her chapstick in the process, and Mia returns it to her. This story needs a trigger warning for drowning and mentions of abusive parents.

Kristine Wyllys’s Ballad of Weary Daughters broke my heart more than a little as I recognized the author’s own struggles with her bipolar disorder in the story. This was a very personal story for Wyllys, which I know because we are mutuals on Twitter (though she is not active there anymore). I hope that readers will be as touched by the realities of her character’s experience on the reservation as I was. Wyllys is an Indigenous Woman of Color.

A reader seeking a story featuring a disabled main character would be able to easily find something that suited them in this anthology. I highly recommend it, and will be purchasing a copy for myself. You can do the same on Amazon or Indiebound!

It can be very difficult to rate short story anthologies because the content is so varied; however, I think that 3 stars would be my average rating. As expected, some stories I enjoyed more than others, but overall I was impressed by the diversity of characters represented. There were LGBT characters, gender fluid characters, persons of color, persons of different religions, and of course, all characters had some sort of disability, whether it be physical, intellectual, or emotional. Some of the genres covered were horror, science fiction, fantasy, and romance.

There were a couple stories where it was not clear what disability the character had. The descriptions were very ambiguous, and if you did not know that this was part of an anthology featuring youth with disabilities, you would probably miss the fact that a disability was even involved. It would have been nice if the authors had covered what inspired the characters they created in their short bios at the end of the anthology.

Another thing that really stood out to me is that the title of the anthology does not adhere to person first language (i.e. Stories Starring Disabled Teens vs. Stories Starring Teens with Disabilities). Admittedly, I am very aware of this distinction due to a training I received at work, so perhaps it does not stand out to others the way it does to me.

I enjoyed this title quite a bit. I thought most of the stories would be realistic, but there's some fantasy mixed in there too. Some of the stories were quite abstract, which may present a problem for some of my readers. As someone who has developed some disabilities in the past few years due to an autoimmune disorder, I found myself able to relate to many of the characters and was wowed by the way some of these authors described the pain associated with having a disability, whether mental or physical. I know some of my students will be able to relate also. I will recommend this one.

I loved this book! We have it our library, and it is featured prominently on a display. It is a great collection that teens and adults will love. Highly recommend.

Nijkamp, Marieke. Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018

This is a collection of #ownvoices stories featuring teens with various disabilities. The stories are intersectional as well, featuring queer teens, teens of color, etc. etc. The stories span a wide variety of genres, lengths, and styles. Highly recommended addition to most public and high school libraries.

Recommended for: teens
Red Flags: none
Overall Rating: 4/5 stars

Read Alikes: All Out: The No Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages; A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

I received a complimentary copy of this book through Netgalley for the purpose of review.