By Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal

Early in Brian Trapp’s novel Range of Motion (Acre, 2025) two brothers attend the coercively named Camp Cheerful for disabled children. Michael acts as a caretaker for his twin brother, Sal, as they navigate the fun and games of camp life in an effort to raise the spirits of Sal, at one point participating in “Messy Olympics,” a loosely defined competition that includes wrapping campers in toilet paper and dizzy baserunning. Early in this section, as each sentence flows with meticulous construction and the clauses billow, Trapp makes it clear that Sal wants no part of the fun, and as Michael spends fifteen minutes swimming in the water, taking a brief moment to enjoy his teenaged self, Sal disappears, escaping Michael’s custody. As we learn later in the novel, Sal has, for the first time, affirmed his own agency in perilous fashion, as teenagers are wont to do.

From this point, Trapp veers back in time to follow the Mitchell family, of which Michael and Sal are part, shifting through each of their close, third person perspectives with a deft, intimate gaze as the twin sons grow up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The mother, Hannah, is a devout Catholic whose faith grounds her survival through motherhood, and the father, Gabe, is a neuroscientist struggling to survive the life of a university researcher. Their different approaches to life and parenthood contrast evenly through the narrative. It is through Gabe we learn that Michael and Sal are born with brain bleeds, and his first image of them as newborns is that of a set of brain scans with white clouds that indicate certain neurological damage. Michael recovers, but Sal develops cerebral palsy, eventually needing a wheelchair for mobility, a computer to speak, and, after a few medical complications, a feeding tube to eat.

Hannah serves as Sal’s primary caretaker, a housewife whose every decision and every thought is dominated by her motherly responsibility to keep Sal alive and well. She subconsciously cultivates a set of traumatic impulses, not unlike that of a prisoner unable to escape the self-imposed isolation that occurs even after institutionalization has ended. She does not drink, and she evades employment, at least until late in the novel. This dedication, driven by the guilt of self-blame for Sal’s condition, is unsustainable, and even she, the rock of this family, endures moments of collapse. There is a sad, beautiful scene after Sal and Michael leave for camp, when she climbs into Sal’s bed and wraps herself in his sheets, unable to process what daily life means for her without a son to spend every waking moment caring for. She is not alone. Michael helps out as much as a teenager who still wants a life and friends outside the home can, but Gabe is a bit hands-off, focusing more on his career and hobbies than on Sal’s immediate needs.

Amongst the three of them, we see another sort of “Messy Olympics,” a subtly competitive family culture in which each member of the family regards their approach as best in caring for Sal. Hannah believes any moment away from Sal is one that places his life at risk, a feeling reinforced when Sal flees Michael at Camp Cheerful. Gabe’s hands-off method is partly a refusal to see his children as individuals beyond their baby brain scan and partly a desire to allow Sal a high degree of freedom. And Michael sits between them, choosing to spend two hours a day with Sal so Hannah can take a daily break. Each is steadfast in their assumption that they know what is best for Sal, and the novel’s driving conflict is their competing desire to impart to Sal some sense of identity and safety. Michael, as Sal’s twin, tries especially hard to serve as interlocutor and translator for Sal. He believes he has a sort of telepathic connection with Sal that gives him an insider’s knowledge into Sal’s speech, one which both parents reject and prohibit him from engaging with.

Range of Motion treads difficult ground. This isn’t a novel concerned with fully representing the interiority of a disabled person, but the consideration of agency is very much central to it. Additionally, there are moments where the language is very real and representative of how harsh the world can be, but the r-word, even censored, begins to peel away at a reader’s skin by the middle of the novel. And the moments when this word is used end in perhaps a too easy series of apologies, resolutions, and forgiveness. But all of this does help build into the frustrations of family life when a member has a medical condition like cerebral palsy. The larger “Messy Olympics” of the book is emotional and intellectual survival. Is it possible to make minor mistakes and grow as a person when even fifteen minutes of relaxation can lead to danger for the family member in your charge? What does it mean to exist as a human being when you’ve been tasked with such a heavy, life-sustaining responsibility? Who “would [this family] even be without Sal?”

At its core, Range of Motion is a novel about agency more than ability. Each member of the family is capable in their own way, including Sal, whose humor and intelligence, vaguely expressed, endear him to his classmates far more than Michael. In sharp contrast to the closely drawn perspectives of his mother, father, and brother, what is asserted of Sal’s interiority is filtered through the various family members, most prominently through Michael, though we are never sure how much of this is an imagined dialogue. In this way, the novel becomes an inverse of Rebekah Taussig’s memoir-in-essays, Sitting Pretty. Where Taussig gives us an internal view of the struggle to participate in the world from a
wheelchair, Trapp, by centering Range of Motion on a neurological disability, focuses in on an external interpretation of the conflicts someone with cerebral palsy might face. This is narratively complicated. Michael is a character prone to daydreaming, and his unreliability as Sal’s interlocuter comes into full focus throughout the novel. And Hannah, in spending so much time with Sal, truly thinks her will and Sal’s are one and the same. The difficulty of understanding someone for whom verbal communication is limited leads the family to speak and narrate on Sal’s behalf. Gabe goes as far as to acknowledge the hazards of this:

               There was danger in filling Sal in with yourself, overwriting him, making him into
               this articulate person when what you’ve actually made is a mirror. It was as if you
               looked into a microscope and saw your own eyeball staring back.

The rotating perspective of family members becomes a fabulous representation of a major issue in caretaking, of what it means to imprint your desires and beliefs onto someone simply because they cannot speak in the same way as others around them.

Here, there is a wonderful formal tapestry that celebrates the familial chaos inherent in disability care and the complicated effects of this care on a family member with cerebral palsy. Unique in its approach, crafty in its scope, and important in its material, the book develops characters with intense emotion and organic sympathy while never leaving us out of the loop or confused about the pressure the Mitchell family is under.

Trapp, who is the Director of Disability Studies at the University of Oregon manages to present the complexity, the messiness, of a caretaking family though these rotating perspectives. He filters the narrative so well through the family that we are sometimes left wanting more of Sal. We, as readers, begin to ask what Sal thinks of all this. This is clearly the result of an intentional move by Trapp. For example, when a member of a support group for moms with disabilities, Ashley, gives up her adopted daughter to a care facility, we see Hannah grappling with the fact that what might be best for Sal could conflict with her own desires to mother and with Sal’s own wishes. It is through this mirror relationship Trapp creates that Hannah begins to see herself and allows us to see her. And through Ashley, she realizes that perhaps she “wanted a more optimistic god than what she got.”

Range of Motion is a novel focused on struggle. Every beat is intricately drawn to show the “Messy Olympics” of pain and sacrifice and to draw out questions of what care means for the disabled person at the center, someone who requires a high level of supervision. How does one discover freedom and purpose when so many others are speaking on their behalf? How can a person verbalize their identity when they are surrounded by well-meaning people who have built a life around their care? It isn’t until the closing lines of the novel that we truly see Sal for himself—facing a door, slightly opened—ready to assert his authentic will on the world before him.

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Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) writes queer, working-class stories, essays, and poems. Winner of the Plaza Short Story Prize, their work can be found in Story, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, and Barrelhouse. They teach Creative Writing at Gannon University and are the Managing Editor for the Best of the Net Anthology at Sundress Publications.