Word Seeds

The Adventures of KatGirl
By Katherine Magnoli
Illustrations by Scott D’Antuono
Published by Excaliber Printing.com and Dexter Educational Toys
Review by Debra Louise Scott

Katherine Magnoli is an emerging children’s writer with a unique perspective. She writes of a young girl, Kat, who is attending her first day of school, and who happens to also be in a wheelchair. Katherine’s story has a very personal feel to it, and one might imagine that she herself may have experienced this very scenario. Her Bio page notes that she was born with a spinal birth defect.

Too often, books that deal with disabilities in children tend to focus on the other children and how they should behave. The disabled child is often idealized with an emphasis on putting forward an accurate picture of what disabled children are like… kind of like an information placard in a zoo.

Katherine’s take is to show the perspective of the child in the wheelchair who experiences for the first time an unkind comment by another child. Kat, the child in the story, holds her temper until school is out then lets it explode. She then comes across the child that taunted her who is now upset with his own problems. Kat then finds that her special wheelchair gives her a very special ability that enables her to help him out. She can fly!

I like that this book shows normal feelings of hurt and anger as well as breaking away from the usual tip-toe around the subject of disabilities. By letting her have a fantastical experience that involves her wheelchair, rather than a fantasy that she can walk or float OUT of her chair, Katherine integrates the child’s imagination with her reality.

The copy I was given is still in draft form, so there were several errors that would be easily corrected by a good editor. The formatting also needs a bit of work. The illustrations are expressive and simple, making it easy for a young child to see the emotions. The book is also available in Spanish under the title “Las Aventuras de SuperKat”. Both are available through Dexter Educational Toys.

Katherine is currently working on her second adventure, with KatGirl meeting a child who is blind. I look forward to seeing how she handles this scenario.