‘Rules’ is problematic Schneider award recipient

Continuing with my discussion of the Schneider Family Book Awards: I struggled with this next part’s social acceptability.

Would expressing concern about a prior award recipient be “second-guessing” a past committee, possibly inviting defensiveness, or would it demonstrate the need for nominated titles to be considered carefully?

Here goes:

For discussion of a problematic Schneider award recipient, I ask that the committee read a review of Rules by Cynthia Lord, the 2007 middle-school winner.

I read Rules and the book’s recognition with a Schneider award for its portrayal of people with disabilities was another cause for uneasiness that I could not personally articulate. But as Riki Entz relates at Disability in KidLit, “Rules wants you to relate to Catherine [the non-disabled main character]. There are very few attempts to humanize David [the main character’s autistic brother].”

A storyline involving Jason, a nonverbal character who uses a wheelchair, “is given better treatment than David” but as Entz relates, Jason’s purpose seems “more to develop Catherine’s character than to be his own independent self.”

I understand from the manual that committee members read critical reviews of the nominated titles. Disability in KidLit does an outstanding job of identifying problematic themes and treatments of characters. I encourage the committee to make use of this resource when evaluating nominees for their portrayal of “the disability experience.”