The First Thing About You by Chaz Hayden
Published by Candlewick Press
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: Contemporary Fiction, Chronic Illness, Medical Scenes, Mobility Aids, Trauma, Coming of Age, Contemporary Romance, Disabled and Neurodivergent Romance, Disabled and Neurodivergent Authors, OwnVoices Representation
My Rating:
Published on: 6th September 2022
Pages: 384
Disability Representation: Addiction Recovery, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Trauma, Wheelchair User
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK / Waterstones / BookBeat Audio
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A high school student with spinal muscular atrophy is determined to reinvent himself in a hilarious and poignant debut from an exciting new voice.

When fifteen-year-old Harris moves with his family from California (home of beautiful-but-inaccessible beaches) to New Jersey (home of some much-hyped pizza and bagels), he’s determined to be known as more than just the kid in the powered wheelchair. Armed with his favorite getting-to-know-you question (“What’s your favorite color?”), he’ll weed out the incompatible people—the greens and the purples, people who are too close to his own blue to make for good friends—and surround himself with outgoing yellows, adventurous oranges, and even thrilling reds. But first things first: he needs to find a new nurse, stat, so that his mom doesn’t have to keep accompanying him to school.

Enter Miranda, a young nursing student who graduated from Harris’s new high school. Beautiful, confident, and the perfect blend of orange and red, Miranda sees Harris for who he really is—funny, smart, and totally worthy of the affections of Nory Fischer, the cute girl who’s in most of his classes. With Miranda at his side, Harris soon befriends geeky Zander (yellow) and even makes headway with Nory (who stubbornly refuses to reveal her favorite color). But Miranda is fighting her own demons, and Harris starts to wonder if she truly has his best interests at heart.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

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GeekDis continues today with my review of Chaz Hayden’s debut novel. The synopsis of The First Thing About You by Chaz Hayden caught my attention straight away as an interesting ownvoices novel about a disabled teenage boy trying to traverse a new school and get to know the cute girl in his class. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the characters and get very emotionally attached to the story. Read on for my full review of this amazing five-star review!

The First Thing About You by Chaz Hayden is one of those books that, as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew I had to read it. There aren’t enough books about disabled teenagers, especially those who are severely disabled, use wheelchairs and/or require a nurse to accompany them to school, and too often they’re written by non-disabled authors. Hayden has the same condition as his protagonist, Harris, spinal muscular atrophy, and his first-hand experience takes The First Thing About You from being a good novel to an exceptional one.

You can tell Hayden’s drawn on his experiences because there are just some things you can’t make up. Every disabled person has a list of them, as do the families of any disabled or ill children who have had to battle the education system (you can read about one of mine here). There are a lot of scenes like that in The First Thing About You as Harris and his mother, Claire, do battle with his new school, who make a lot of promises to support him and fails spectacularly at getting him into one of them. There’s a particular scene involving a nurse who accompanies Harris for a day to see how they get along, and she does something that has Harris quickly telling Mom Claire that it’s not going to work out. You’re probably thinking of all the things a bad nurse could do at this point, and I can assure you, what she actually does is probably not on your list.

I’m not going to say that Harris is just a “normal” kid because he’s not, and he is well aware of that. For a start, no one else has to have their mom go to school with them because the agency hasn’t been able to find a suitable nurse for Harris yet. That’s every teenager’s worst nightmare, and that doesn’t change whether you’re disabled or not. Harris’ life is different, and Hayden doesn’t shy away from showing that, but he also excels in showing that Harris is a teenage boy. He’s just as nervous about starting a new school as anyone else would be, and he’s determined that it’s a fresh start. He even has the perfect get-to-know-you question: What is your favourite colour?” Everyone has a favourite colour, and Harris knows that colours can tell you a lot about a person.

So when a cute girl keeps crossing his path and refuses to tell him what her favourite colour is, Harris is equally confused, worried and smitten. The more time he spends with Nory, the more he likes her; however, his knowledge of colours tells him that if her favourite colour is something too close to his favourite, blue, then their relationship won’t work out.

Just as Harris is trying to navigate high school, friendship and teenage love, his new nurse Miranda comes into his life. A nursing student, Miranda, used to go to Harris’s high school and has all the inside scoop about the teachers. She’s young and fun, nothing like any nurse he has ever had before. She sees him struggling to work out what is happening with Nory, and he sees her wanting to become the best nurse she can be. The two of them make a pact; she’ll teach him about girls, and he’ll teach her to be a nurse.

I want to emphasise now that The First Thing About You does not turn into a carer/disabled person romance trope, nor does anything inappropriate happen. The role Miranda plays in this book is as a bridge between adulthood and adolescence, as someone who is taking their steps out of one world and into the other. As the synopsis suggests, Miranda has her own story, and it’s complicated. She’s been through a lot, and when she meets Harris, she hasn’t worked through them. While she helps Harris in many ways, this is also a book about the harm that we can do to others if we don’t look after ourselves first.

One of the things I liked most about The First Thing About You was the way it explored family dynamics. I’ve mentioned Harris’ mom, Claire, a few times already, and she is a big part of this novel. Hayden does a great job of showing how complex people are with his writing, and this particularly shows in how he writes Claire. As I said, Claire accompanies Harris to school when a nurse isn’t available, and while she is worried and panicked like a normal mom outside of school, when she’s at school, she’s Claire, not mom. She understands what it would do to Harris if people knew his mom was at school with him.

There are times in the book when her frustration with Harris’ school resonated deeply with me, and then there were times when I felt she crossed the line. Those were the moments when I recognised an adult struggling, a mother who was fighting a broken system in a new city alone, as her husband’s new job is taking up many more hours than either of them expected. While I understood all of that, it didn’t excuse the pressure she was putting on her fifteen-year-old son to deal with the school bureaucracy or talk to his nurse about running late. Claire isn’t a bad mother; she’s an imperfect one, and I appreciated that Hayden showed what the relationship between a disabled person and a carer relative is like. It’s frustrating, it’s messy, and it’s still filled with love, and ultimately that is what shines through in The First Thing About You.

Harris’ family feature a lot in The First Thing About You. Whether it’s in the form of family dinners, weekend football game days or family outings. At first glance, they seem to have a great relationship; however, over the course of the book, it becomes obvious that’s not the case. Harris’ dad, Jay, is working a lot, and his brother Ollie is avoiding questions about his new school. By the end of the book, Harris recognises that his relationship with his brother needs work, from his end. He’s changed a lot from the Harris we met at the start, and it’s the people that he meets along the way that helped him step outside his comfort zone, to try new things and to not judge people by their choice of colour.

The way Hayden utilises colour in The First Thing About You is brilliant. It starts as a way for Harris to get through the difficult times when he’s younger, to connect with people, and Hayden delves into how something that originally helped Harris has begun to limit his interactions with people. Rather than connecting with people, he shies away from people based on what their favourite colour says about them. When Nory refuses to give him that information, it conflicts with what he knows; people always have a favourite colour (mine are purple and teal if you’re wondering, like a typical Libra, I can’t pick just one!). She’s an enigma, her favourite colour a mystery and as their relationship develops, Harris begins to understand that maybe he doesn’t need to know what her favourite colour is after all.

The First Thing About You is a fantastic novel that will make you laugh, cry, fill your heart with joy and equally make you scream in frustration at ableism existing in this world. Disabled readers will particularly appreciate Harris’ tongue-in-cheek commentary and sarcasm as Hayden delivers this classic boy-in-a-wheelchair meets girl love story with just the right mix of humour. This has quickly gone on my recommended list, and I would definitely recommend looking to see what Hayden releases next!

About Chaz Hayden

Chaz Hayden is a debut author who, like his main character, was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy as an infant and spent his childhood in and out of hospitals. The First Thing About You, he says, is “not just about disability but about friendship and love and all the things that a young person hopes to experience.” Through his writing and his YouTube channel, he speaks with abundant positivity and encourages people to “Be different. Leave a trail.” Chaz Hayden grew up in New Jersey and now lives in Pennsylvania, where he spends too much time thinking about his next tattoo and what concerts to attend.

Website | Goodreads | Instagram

Thanks for reading my review for The First Thing About You by Chaz Hayden! Chaz Hayden is currently holding a competition to win a signed copy of The First Thing About You over on Twitter (please note this is not an international giveaway, but the author notes that he will be holding one soon!).

That just leaves me to ask… what is your favourite colour? 😉

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

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