The Ables (2015)

In poking around for diverse books that I can share with schoolteachers, I came upon this series, which is pitched toward late-middle-grade to early-YA. I loved the idea of a superhero book series that revolves around a group of young heroes with disabilities, but for me, the first installment leaves a fair amount to be desired.

At 12 years old, Phillip gets “the talk” from his dad. No, not that one – the talk in which Phillip learns that he and his family are custodians, individuals with genetic superhuman abilities. He’s just at the age where he’s started to come into his powers (telekinesis,) and the family has moved to a special custodian-refuge town where he’ll go to school with other kids like him, where he can learn about being a hero. Phillip, who’s blind, resents being put in the special ed class of his new school, but as he makes friends with some of the other boys in his class, they set out to prove that disabled kids with powers can learn to wield them just as well as any able-bodied student. It just so happens that that quest coincides with the arrival of a mysterious new player in town, one who wields incredible abilities and is determined to see the culmination of a custodian prophecy.

The basic “town/school for superheroes” premise is a true-and-true one, and I like the exploration of what it would be like for special ed kids in a setting like that. While Phillip and his friends find that their disabilities can pose challenges for them in both every and superhuman things – for instance, most telekinetics can use their abilities to move anything they can see, but because Phillip is blind, he needs more information about an object’s size, shape, and distance from him in order to manipulate it. However, as is so often the case in real life, the difficulties that arise from their disabilities pale in comparison to the barriers they face in a society that resists accommodating them. How depressing would it be to discover you’re part of a long line of superheroes, only to find out that none of those heroes think you even deserve a chance to learn how to fight alongside them? This is much more a story about fighting ableism (and supervillains) than it is about “overcoming” disability.

I enjoy the friendship and budding superhero-team dynamics between Phillip and his friends. There’s some nice variety in the characters’ personalities, powers, and disabilities, and it’s fun to see how they alternately band together, problem-solve, and bicker over tactics. The villain they confront in this first book is very textbook-baddie, but I imagine he and his run-ins with the gang would be sufficiently-creepy for younger readers.

On the whole, though, I wanted to like this more than I did. The writing can be clunky and definitely leans toward over-explanation, and I’ve read enough middle-grade and YA books by now to know that that’s not a requirement of the age range. There are practically no female characters of an importance in the book, which is a major bummer, and the female character with the largest role is served really poorly by the story. And, most disappointingly for me, there’s a particular way that the kids use their powers in conjunction with one another to negate some of their disabilities entirely. Not adapt or accommodate, but negate. And from a representation standpoint, that’s shady. It’s harder to find books about kids with disabilities than BIPOC kids or LGBTQ kids, and I wish the first one I found didn’t pull a Daredevil with some of its disabled superheroes.

Warnings

Violence, death, frightening imagery, and thematic elements.