From her career as a speech therapist, Jan Slepian has brought an understanding of the dilemmas facing young people who suffer from physical, mental, and social handicaps to young adult fiction. Praised for novels that champion those people left outside the social mainstream--the ones not targeted by Madison Avenue advertisers, whose day-to-day lives are rarely, if ever, the subject of popular magazine articles, comic books, movies, television shows, short stories, or novels--her unlikely protagonists encounter events that challenge their perception of themselves as "not good enough" and force them to transcend their emotional, if not physical afflictions. Slepian "writes thought-provoking books," concludes Twentieth- Century Young Adult Writers contributor Carol Doxey, "stimulating young adults to think for themselves and to strive to overcome problems that have seemed like mountains until, after Slepian's characters, they seem like mere anthills."

Born in Manhattan, New York, in 1921, and raised in an immigrant...