Good Kings Bad Kings: A Novel
*Starred Review* This year’s winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction is a mighty first novel by a Chicago playwright and disabilities-rights activist. Nussbaum’s dramatist skills translate powerfully into fiction as she gives voice to an infatuating cast of characters assembled in the Illinois Learning and Life Skills Center, a nursing home for young people with physical and mental challenges. Yessina Lopez is an assertive and giving teen whose wheelchair does not inhibit her quest for autonomy and love. There is courtly romance between Teddy Dobbs, the only resident whose father visits, and sweet and severely abused cerebral palsy sufferer Mía Ovíedo. Smart and wittily sarcastic Joanne Madsen, who uses a wheelchair with aplomb ever since being hit by a city bus, is the center’s new data-entry clerk, and she becomes sharply attuned to the tender hearts of the kids and the indifference, even malevolence, of the administrators. The center’s bus driver, Ricky Hernandez, also cares passionately for his young charges and worries about their treatment. Nussbaum charms, outrages, and enlightens readers as she cycles among these and other characters, boldly contrasting the transcendence of love with the harsh realities of a negligent for-profit nursing home. This is unquestionably an authentic, galvanizing, and righteous novel. --Donna Seaman--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.