Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability from Squirmy & Grubs and Other Interabled ­Couples

Gr 10 Up–Burcaw’s third collection of essays about disability, this one cowritten with his wife, expands on the previous works by including interviews, short stories, and essays from other folks with disabilities. They share in the introduction that they tried to provide “a representative smattering of many walks of life, with a variety of disabilities, races, orientations, and ages.” The collection focuses on love and relationships as experienced by interabled couples, meaning “a relationship that involves one or both partners living with a disability.” About half of the collection focuses on Shane Burcaw, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and is a wheelchair user, and his relationship with Hannah Burcaw. The other half of the book includes stories of people with a wide variety of visible and invisible disabilities: folks who live with ulcerative colitis, PTSD, fibromyalgia, and others. The Burcaws are most recognized from their YouTube channel, but may not be very familiar to today’s teens. The collection is frank and characterized by the YouTube channel’s usual tone and humor. The stories are oriented mostly towards those living as adults with concerns regarding marriage, IVF, and starting families.