and despite a setting ripe for cringey or cruel depictions, in fact it's one of the most humane representations of disabled people I've read. There are the wheelers and the blind and those missing limbs, and the developmentally disabled. Some are categorized by their disabilities, but they don't really align themselves according to shared disabilities.

The First through the Sixth houses are each known by some other name - e.g., the Hounds, the Rats, or the aloof, isolated, rules-abiding Pheasants of the First. Yes, yes, cue the Hogwarts references here, but really, this is the most un-Hogwarts-like book about children going to a bizarre maybe-magical school you can imagine. The House is divided into 'houses' or 'packs,' largely self-selecting but also ordered by some arcane process and sometimes by people choosing to move. They aren't all orphans, but those who have parents almost never mention them, and only towards the end do a few parents show up and become relevant. The Gray House is a big old house where disabled children are sent to live. In Russian, the title is more like 'The House, in Which.' It was a bestseller in Russia before it was translated. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws - all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers' eyes.īut student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths.īound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides.

The grey house mariam petrosyan