Book Review: The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers by Jen Campbell

Originally posted Oct 2022 on Instagram

[ID: An illustrated book with a spooky fox like creature in black on the cover. It sits on a white shelf with an old fashioned feather pen in front and three dark red-purple carnations next to a crumpled ball of paper. A brown bookend shaped like a bird cage sits to the left.]

I’ve been disturbing everyone with this… interesting book title (shout out to my parents who bought this at a bookstore at my request and kept a straight face when asking the bookseller about it) so it seems the appropriate way to bring us into spooky season! ⁣
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I’m still pretty much a baby when it comes to horror but I was intrigued enough to readThe Sister Who Ate Her Brothers because I heard it had disability representation and I adore fairytales. ⁣
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Unfortunately, I feel like this book was not what I expected and so it was kind of a mediocre experience for me. The illustrations are gorgeous, but I guess I was expecting a book interrogating the connection between disability and fairy tales like Amanda Leduc’s nonfiction Disfigured. Instead, I got a fairy tale book where some of the characters were disabled, but it didn’t really affect their stories that much. ⁣
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I like the idea of disability rep becoming so prevalent we get diverse casts without the stories always having to be about disability, but that just wasn’t what I wanted when I picked up this book. It felt like a missed opportunity to dig deeper.⁣