Asthma and The Mirror Empire

[ambyr]

I thought this Whirling Nerdish blog post about the portrayal of disability in Kameron Hurley's latest fantasy novel might be interesting to some people here:

Asthma and THE MIRROR EMPIRE

As I write this, my hands are shaking. Not because I'm distressed. Not because I'm tired or hungry or my blood sugar is low. They're shaking because I took my inhaler. I woke up this morning, and for some reason, I couldn't take in a full breath.

...

Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire features a main character that has asthma. I'm only about 100 pages into the book, but so far, this girl is my favorite character. Because she's got a strong spirit, she's brave as fuck, and she gets shit done. But when things get real, when she has to physically exert herself--climbing stairs, fleeing bad guys, etc., she gets wheezy; she gets short of breath.

Comments

[sasha_feather]

Awesome, thanks for the link!

[davidgillon]

Looking forward to seeing how this goes. The combination of visible and invisible disabilities, which Hurley's protagonist has, is a difficult one. I've regularly found it impossible to convince people that my chronic pain is more disabling than my using crutches.

[jesse_the_k]

Or my mental issues are more impairing than the physical ones ....

But in my perfect world, I don't need to convince anyone of my reality :)

[badgerbag]

I appreciated the realistic touches of inhalers, pain, and limping and, in a way, that she doesn't get magically better which always seems to happen in sf/fantasy books where someone has a health problem. Well, not counting vampires.