The Disability Book Archive

[ID: Book cover for ‘The Spirit Bares Its Teeth’ by Andrew Joseph White. The author’s name is at the top of the cover in black capitals. The book title is at the bottom of the cover in larger black capitals. Cover art shows the figure of a person with pale skin in the centre. They are wearing a long sleeved purple dress, have long orange hair, purple eyes and a black circle around their head like a halo. This image is in an orange oval border. Around the border, black squares and art of variously sized purple eyes. The edges of the cover are orange. A purple eye is in each corner of the cover. /end]

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Content Warning:

Taken from Goodreads reviews, Storygraph and The Trigger Warning Database.

• Homophobia
• Transphobia
• Ableism
• Gore
• Injury
• Injury Detail
• On page Child Sexual Assault
• Graphic Depictions of C-Section
• Misgendering and Dead-naming
• Misogyny and Sexism
• Conversion Therapy
• Dissociation
• Forced Institutionalisation
• Involuntary Pregnancy
• Graphic Self-Abortion
• Miscarriage (mentioned, discussed)
• Graphic Medical Procedures
• Graphic Medical Experimentation
• Death (of a friend, of parents)
• Vomit
• Forced Marriage

Taken from author’s website:

• Graphic violence
• Sexual assault – implied, attempted, and on-page
• Medical gore, including an on-page Cesarean section
• Transphobia (explicit misgendering, dead-naming, transphobic violence/conversion therapy)
• Anti-autistic ableism
• Medical/psychiatric abuse, including dubious diagnosis and treatment
• Gaslighting and abuse
• Minor discussions of miscarriage 

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Summary:

Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all.

London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.

After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.

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Notes:

The archive entry for White’s book ‘Hell Followed With Us’ can be found here.

The author’s note at the beginning of this book contains a more general list of content warnings.

There is an audiobook.

There is an ebook. There is a kindle edition.

Awards that this book has been nominated for:

• Locus Award for Young Adult (2024)
• Stonewall Book Award for Young Adult Literature (2024)
• NAIBA Book of the Year for Young Adult Literature (2024) (Winner)

Here is a link to the author’s website.

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Archivist Comments:

Fun fact: This is the most submitted book to the archive.

I stand by that the hardest part of trying to add any of White’s books is describing the covers. They’re beautiful, but my god. Must take an incredible amount of time to make them.

I will say that I do appreciate just how much information is available for these books. The author includes content warnings on his websites and in the book themselves, and has a representation catalogue that lists the various forms of representation seen in the books. It makes my job significantly easier, and also seems to be quite greatly appreciated by the people who read them.

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