By Centre for Equitable Library Access
CELA is a national accessible library service which provides more than 1.4 million titles to people in Canada who have print disabilities. It is estimated that more than 1 in 10 people have a print disability which includes low vision or blindness, learning disabilities, or physical disabilities which make it difficult to read print. Globally as few as 1 in 7 titles published are available in accessible formats and a lack of access to reading materials impacts academic, economic and social opportunities. Our services ensure that people with print disabilities across the country are more able to fully participate in learning, work and community life and contribute to the social, cultural, and economic development and success of their local and broader communities.
We’re delighted to work with the FOLD on this challenge and we’ve chosen books which highlight a diverse slate of authors from Canada and Turtle Island who share important perspectives, stories and information, not just for our users but for all readers.
1) Sweetness in the Skin by Ishi Robinson (Harper) — Available on Audible
A winning debut novel about a Jamaican girl determined to bake her way out of her dysfunctional family and into the opportunity of a lifetime.
Pumkin Patterson is a thirteen-year-old girl living in a tiny two-room house in Kingston, Jamaica, with her grandmother (who wants to improve the family’s social standing), her Aunt Sophie (who dreams of a new life in Paris for her and Pumkin), and her mother Paulette (who’s rarely home).
When Sophie is offered the chance to move to France for work, she seizes the opportunity, and promises to send for her niece in one year’s time. All Pumkin has to do is pass her French entrance exam so she can attend school there. But when Pumkin’s grandmother dies, she’s left alone with her volatile mother, and as soon as her estranged father turns up—as lazy and conniving as ever—the household’s fortunes take a turn for the worse.
Pumkin must somehow find a way to raise the money for her French exam, so she can free herself from her household and reunite with her beloved aunt in France. In a moment of ingenuity, she turns her passion for baking into a true business. Making batches of sweet potato pudding, coconut drops and chocolate cakes, Pumkin develops a booming trade—but when her school and her mother find out what she’s up to, everything she’s worked so hard for may slip through her fingers. . .
Sweetness in the Skin is a funny and heartbreaking story about a young girl figuring out who she is, what she is capable of—and where she truly belongs.
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2) Voice: Adam Pottle on Writing with Deafness by Adam Pottle (University of Regina Press) — Available on Audible
In Voice, Adam Pottle explores the crucial role deafness has played in the growth of his imagination, and in doing so presents a unique perspective on a writer’s development. Born deaf in both ears, Pottle recounts what it was like growing up in a world of muted sound, and how his deafness has influenced virtually everything about his writing, from his use of language to character and plot choices. Salty, bold, and relentlessly honest, Voice makes us think about writing in entirely new ways and expands our understanding of deafness and the gifts that it can offer.
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3) Everything and Nothing At All: Essays by Jenny Heijun Wills (Knopf Canada) — Available on Audible
“Here is my disconnect: the private and public self. My mind and body. The real person and curated spectacle. . . . Are there actual roots with which to fasten this performance to anything real?”
As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and “community”; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills’ being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.
Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills’ self, transforming them into something more—something that could be everything.
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4) Behind You by Catherine Hernandez (HarperAvenue) — Available on Audible
As terror grips a city, a young girl faces danger closer to home and chilling memories that last a lifetime.
Catherine Hernandez’s most gripping and affecting novel yet, Behind You is inspired by a horrifying chapter in Canadian history and follows fictional characters terrorized by a fictional perpetrator.
Alma is a Filipina woman who works as a film editor for a cheesy True Crime series featuring the most notorious killers of the 20th century called Infamous. On the surface she seems to live a good life with her wife Nira and teenage son, Mateo. But there is so much left unsaid.
It’s not until Infamous‘ last episode features the Scarborough Stalker that she remembers coming of age while the serial rapist and killer was attacking women and girls in Scarborough in the late 80s and early 90s.
What unfolds are two storylines: In the past, young Alma watches an entire city become consumed with a manhunt for an elusive, terrifying suspect, while she herself is in jeopardy from closer corners. In the present, adult Alma must come to terms with her own ideas of consent to stop her son’s dangerous behaviour towards his girlfriend.
Weaving back and forth in time, Behind You, is a moving story of one girl’s resilience into adulthood and a chilling portrayal of the insidiousness if rape culture. It daringly turns the Whodunit genre on its head by asking the question “Who hasn’t done it?” As in, who has not been complicit in sexual harm?
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Hudson Lin