Local Author's New Children's Book Puts Disabled Kids at the Centre

The new book from Dorothy Ellen Palmer opens with a group of disabled kids raising money to build a ramp to their local bakery, and ends with them working out that making the bakery accessible was never their job in the first place. Melanie and the Wheelie Friends Save the Day comes out on Tuesday, October 6.

It is the sequel to The Scooter Twins, which Palmer published in 2024 and which won the Jean Throop Award for children's picture books that same year. Illustrator Maria Sweeney, also a disability advocate, is back for the second book.

Palmer wrote for adult readers for years before turning to children's books. Living with a disability herself, she said the gap in what was available pushed her into it. "As a little girl growing up, as a young mother reading to her kids and now as a grandmother reading to her grandson, there were so few books that gave disabled kids agency," she said. "Books where they were real kids living real lives. There are basically no books about disabled youth written by Canadian disabled authors, and it made me realize that being a disability advocate means reaching kids too."

Her argument is that the audience is wider than the kids the books are about. "All kids need to see disabled kids for it to be normalized in the world," Palmer said, adding that the books give adults reading aloud a way into those conversations with their own children.

Writing short turned out to be the hard part. "It's much harder to fit a story into just 750 words, but in ways it can be so much more rewarding," she said. "You're reaching kids while their thinking is still forming and you end up being part of their growing up and shaping the way they see the world." Palmer has taken part in the Royal Botanical Gardens' Telling Tales Festival in the past, and a third book is already sketched out, this one about bullying and how the characters handle it.