Despite the success illness novels have acquired in the last decade, the misrepresentation of chronic illness in the Young Adult genre is still going unnoticed. In an ableist society that still needs to be educated about invisible disabilities, most of the contemporary YA writers insist on finding miraculous solutions and questionable happy endings to their stories. The aim of this thesis is therefore to study the different ways in which YA writers fetishize and understate invisible disability and to find a way to subvert it. By focusing on the miracle cure trope and romanticization in the case of Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything, it attempts to highlight the characteristics of low-quality disability fiction and demonstrate why and how the use of disability biases can affect negatively both disabled and nondisabled young readers. In addition, through the scrutiny of the author’s first YA novel, Nothing Wrong with Snails, it then illustrates how the in-depth analysis of past disability literature improved the author’s personal craft and enabled them to portray chronic illness and invisible disability avoiding stereotypes, biases, and tropes. In conclusion, it argues that writers ought to rely on disability studies in order to reach higher standards in the representation of invisible disability in YA fiction.

In this paper, I analyze and compare the novel The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon with the filmscript by Tracy Oliver for the 2019 movie adaptation. First, I demonstrate how the narrative in The Sun Is Also a Star deals with the literary ideas of fate and destiny and how scholars have defined the concepts. Secondly, I argue that the filmscript is a literary text that can be equated to the novel in a literary analysis of their narrative features. I claim that the narrative features of the novel and the filmscript embody fate and destiny in different ways because of the differences in their narrative situations and thought representations. I argue that the narrative situation of the novel, with its authorial narrator and narrative levels, embodies a relationship between fate and destiny as different perspectives are put into focus in the narration. However, the filmscript embodies these concepts as distinct because the narrative situation of the heterodiegetic narrator does not represent the same connectedness. I then maintain this argument as the filmscript in its thought representation and replacement of it with images and speech representation continues to portray the concepts as separate. In contrast, the thought representation of the novel embodies the relationship between the concepts because the thoughts represent connectedness and cause and effect. In my concluding remarks, I look at possible areas of future research.