Her social life had been centered on the hockey team, and though people suggested things like wheelchair basketball, she says she’s not interested in any “adaptive bullshit.”Īdam Hartley lives across the hall from Corey, in the other accessible dorm room. When she went back to high school after her injury, most of her old friends drifted away, and she constantly saw how conversation would stop whenever she entered the room. Sometimes I felt like punching those people.Ĭorey is also intensely aware of how other people see her. That they stop taking everything for granted. Some people say that after a life-threatening event, they learn to enjoy life more.

I never dreamed I’d show up for college in a wheelchair. She’s still working through a lot of issues with her self-image, though - she’s always been a jock, and she’s not really sure how to define herself now that she can’t play hockey. She’s excited about getting some distance from her overprotective parents, and she’s getting the hang of navigating the world in a wheelchair. Corey Callihan is a college freshman who became disabled from a spinal cord injury while playing on her high school hockey team the previous year. The Year We Fell Down does a pretty good job of finding the right balance on these issues. But on the other hand, it often seems like it’s one of the most common plots when it comes to books with disabled characters, and many of these books are painful to read, with the character constantly referring to themselves as “damaged” or “broken,” and convinced that they cannot possibly live a fulfilling life while disabled. On the one hand, it is something that a lot of people go through, and it is an important story to tell. I tend to have a lot of mixed feelings on books where the main character has only recently become disabled.

The Year We Fell Down by Sarina Bowen