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🧲 Books like this

The Story of Beautiful Girl

Rachel Simon · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Petey

Ben Mikaelsen · 280 pages

In 1922 Petey, who has cerebral palsy, is misdiagnosed as an idiot and institutionalized; sixty years later, still in the institution, he befriends a boy and shares with him the joy of life.

AsylumDisabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationEmotional
❤️

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards · 408 pages

Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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Grace Williams Says It Loud

Emma Henderson · 327 pages

On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, who can type with his feet, fills Grace's head with tales from Paris and the world beyond. This is Grace's story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny s

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistAsylumEmotional
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The Longest Ride

Nicholas Sparks · 477 pages

After being trapped in an isolated car crash, the life of an elderly widower becomes entwined with that of a young college student and the cowboy she loves.

Widowed ProtagonistHopefulEmotionalHistorical Fiction
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Me Before You

Jojo Moyes · 451 pages

Louisa Clark is an ordinary young woman living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cann

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationHopefulEmotional
❤️

The War that Saved My Life

Kimberly Brubaker Bradley · 349 pages

Nine-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—she sneaks out to join him. So begins a new adventure of Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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Archer's Voice

Mia Sheridan · 366 pages

From New York Times bestselling author Mia Sheridan comes an emotional, slow burn romance about a woman desperate to hide and the man who sees through her walls, perfect for fans of Colleen Hoover and Lucy Score. I wanted to lose myself in the small town of Pelion, Maine. To forget everything I had left behind. The sound of rain. The blood. The coldness of a gun against my skin. For six months,

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 544 pages

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are t

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationHopefulEmotional
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

James McBride · 614 pages

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared amb

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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Wonder

R.J. Palacio · 330 pages

## **Don't judge a boy by his face.** ## Auggie is a kid who just wants to be ordinary. He does ordinary things, like play on his Xbox and watch TV and eat. But ordinary kids don't make people stare just by walking down the block. They don't scare kids by looking at his face. They *definitely* haven't had over 20 surgeries by age 10. But when Auggie starts going to school for the first time in h

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationEmotionalHopeful
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Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio · 308 pages

At the age of ten, an Appalachian girl develops croaks, jerks and spasms, which leads to her explusion from school. After treatment--she has Tourette's syndrome--she learns to control herself, attends college and there is a happy ending.

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationHopefulEmotional
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The Miracle Worker

William Gibson · 122 pages

A text of the television play, intended for reading, of Anne Sullivan Macy's attempts to teach her pupil, Helen Keller, to communicate.

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationHopefulEmotional
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Peace Like a River

Leif Enger · 313 pages

"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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Out of My Mind

Sharon M. Draper · 305 pages

Eleven-year-old Melody has a photographic memory. Her head is like a video camera that is always recording. Always. And there's no delete button. She's the smartest kid in her whole school, but no one knows it. Most people — her teachers and doctors included — don't think she's capable of learning, and until recently her school days consisted of listening to the same preschool-level alphabet lesso

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationHopefulEmotional
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Ten Tiny Breaths

K.A. Tucker · 262 pages

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Everything, Everything

Nicola Yoon · 320 pages

The story of a teenage girl who's literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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The Reading List

Sara Nisha Adams · 368 pages

Widowed ProtagonistHopefulEmotionalMultiple POV
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Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the

HopefulEmotionalMultiple POVHistorical Fiction
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Making Faces

Amy Harmon · 300 pages

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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Left Neglected

Lisa Genova · 416 pages

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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo · 443 pages

In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.

Disabled ProtagonistDisability RepresentationEmotionalMultiple POV
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The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Robert Dugoni · 448 pages

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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Lucky Broken Girl

Ruth Behar · 243 pages

In 1960s New York, fifth-grader Ruthie, a Cuban-Jewish immigrant, must rely on books, art, her family, and friends in her multicultural neighborhood when an accident puts her in a body cast.

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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House Rules

Jodi Picoult · 532 pages

Disability RepresentationDisabled ProtagonistHopefulEmotional
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