By Sharon M. Draper
A brilliant girl with cerebral palsy who can't speak finally gets a device that lets her talk, and discovers how badly the world underestimated her.
Melody is the smartest child in her school, and almost nobody knows it, because cerebral palsy means she can't walk, talk, or feed herself. She has a photographic memory and a mind full of words she's never been able to say. Then she gets a computer that speaks for her, and for the first time she can tell the world what she thinks, just as the world keeps proving how little it expected of her.
This is the trail's summit, the book that puts your child all the way inside a disabled narrator's head and keeps them there. Draper writes Melody's brilliance and her fury so directly that your child stops seeing a wheelchair and starts seeing a person being constantly, maddeningly underestimated. It asks the most of a reader emotionally, and it rewards them by making the injustice impossible to un-feel. A child who reads this will never again assume that a body that works differently means a mind that does.