ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on depictions of access to healthcare and obstacles to receiving treatment in two examples of US fiction for young adult readers: Mildred Taylor's novel, The Road to Memphis, set in 1940s Mississippi, and Cynthia Voigt's Seventeen Against the Dealer. In these contemporaneously published examples, figures such as the sick young adult, the working young adult and the young adult caregiver are central. The chapter explores the ways in which these fragile subjects and the actions of those around them when accessing care are constructed both thematically and linguistically. In both novels, illness forms a backdrop to the rest of the action, marking them as quite different to the 'sick lit' genre in which the fragile subject in the form of a sick or dying child takes centre stage, as in John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.
