War of the Wind by Victoria Williamson
Published today, Victoria Williamson’s book is adventurous and thrilling. We were thrilled to read about her experiences as a young reader as well as the importance of representation in books.
Between the ages of seven and twelve, my favourite books were all adventure stories. I loved The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Three Investigators, The Tripods, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. While I did notice that when there were boys in the books they tended to take the lead more often – which annoyed me a great deal as a fearless tree-climbing, danger-loving ten-year-old girl who loved to swim in the sea and ride my bike at top speed – what I didn’t notice at the time, was the lack of characters with disabilities. It wasn’t until I became a teacher many years later that I started to notice that not all of the children in my classes were represented in the books in the school libraries.
Often we talk about books being doorways into other worlds, which is very true. Stories can help us escape our everyday lives, to go on adventures with exciting people in new worlds, and to understand what it might be like to be someone completely different from ourselves. However, books have a second equally important function. They also serve as mirrors, reflecting people like us going on adventures, making mistakes, overcoming challenges and becoming braver in the process. While we can all learn to empathise and identify with other people, if children with disabilities never see characters like themselves reflected in the books they read, then they miss out on many of the inspirational lessons that stories can teach them about what it’s possible to achieve in life.
This lack of representation can lead to difficulty in imagining lead characters which don’t fit the ‘lead character’ stereotype when it comes to children’s own creative writing. Growing up reading books where often boys were the main instigators of the action, I found that I was repeating this in my on writing. In all of the early stories I wrote as a child and in my teens, the main character was an able-bodied male. Even though there had been some representation of female characters in the books I enjoyed growing up, I’d learned the lesson that unless it was a book with only female characters – a book ‘for girls’ – then these characters often played secondary roles. It took a bit of effort for me to change this pattern when I started attempting my first novels in my twenties, but once I started writing adventure stories with female leads, I found that it became much easier to imagine all different types of characters playing the most important roles in the action.
Fortunately the children’s fiction world has changed a great deal from the 80’s when I was growing up, and there are many more contemporary-issue children’s books with a diverse range of lead characters in them. The children’s fiction market is vast, though, and it’s not enough for children with disabilities to have one or two issue-based books out there where they feel seen and represented. It’s up to all of us – authors, teachers, parents and readers – to continue to advocate for positive representation of disability in all genres of children’s fiction in order to ensure that every child can see a fictional hero like themselves going on the most exciting adventures imaginable, or taking on any challenge and overcoming it. Books are worlds full of possibilities, and if children see reflections of themselves taking on a multitude of roles in stories, then it helps them to imagine themselves as leaders and instigators of action in ways that can have positive real-life effects on their confidence and sense of accomplishment.
War of the Wind by Victoria Williamson is published today, from Seven Seas, a collection part of Neem Tree Press.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.
