A New Kind of Beautiful by Suzy Zail

Title: A New Kind of Beautiful

Author: Suzy Zail

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Walker Books

Published: 1^st August 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 384

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: A moving novel about love, loss, and the beauty in the things we can’t always see.

Paige Wilding has her future mapped out — the Year 10 Art prize. Graduation. A coveted spot in an elite art school in New York. But when she’s diagnosed with an incurable eye disease, the perfect life she’s planned starts to blur.

She makes a choice to keep her condition secret and live louder, love wilder, and paint like her life depends on it. Only her best friend Jazz knows the truth, and is helping her cram a lifetime of colour into a single year.

But as her sight fades and she’s forced to give up painting, it’s Zac, her rival for the art prize, who helps Paige find a way back to her art and a new kind of beautiful; messy and imperfect but also raw, unfiltered and fiercely alive.

A powerful story about choosing real over perfect.

~*~

Paige is sixteen, and has worked out her future already. Art school with her best friend Jazz in New York. Yet at the start of year ten, she’s diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease, an eye disease that gets progressively worse, taking the vision that Paige has relied on and assumed she has needed to create good art for so long.

Paige is resistant to everything her parents try to get her to do at first. She’d rather keep the disability a secret, work around it and try to fit in. Try to live louder and love wilder. And she is painting like her life depends on it, but what she does never seems to be good enough for her Art teacher, Madame Durand.

Her fading sight makes her see things differently, experience things differently. She is forced to give up painting, forced out of her friendship group and feels forced into a slurry of appointments and counselling that will end up helping her navigate life with a disability.  Jazz is doing her best to help Paige, but Jazz is drawn into a group with other people who don’t understand, and don’t want to understand.

It’s Zac Buccaletti, Paige’s rival for the Art prize who does. He listens without judgement. He helps her find a way back into her art, and helps her realise that getting help and support from the people and places she’s been resisting for most of the year can help. Nobody can fully understand what Paige is going through, and nor will they want to. Paige needs to find the people who can understand and want to help, who will make the effort and show her that she can still live her life, still be an artist and still make the world beautiful.

Suzy Zail’snew novel was inspired by the story of a relative who had Retinitis Pigmentosa during the first half of the 20^th century in South Africa. Her husband’s aunt Lil didn’t get the support Paige does. Instead, she was hidden away, kept from society until she moved to Australia. Disabled people should never be hidden away from society, and that is why stories like this are important. Whilst Suzy, as far as I know, doesn’t have vision issues like the ones represented in her novel, she did a fabulous job consulting with Jane Cherry, who talked to Suzy about her experience with vision loss to help create Paige’s raw reactions throughout the novel from diagnosis to acceptance of a new future.

Instead of relying on sight, Paige relies on her other senses. Touch, hearing, smell and taste, and all of these came across eloquently. The degree of research and consultation Suzy has done with people like Jane, and organisations like Guide Dogs shaped the story, and as a Guide Dogs volunteer, made it feel very real. A lot of the knowledge that shaped some of what Paige had to learn, I learned from doing various modules to understand low vision for my Guide Dogs work. I think it shows that when we work together like this, when we are willing to do the research and talk to people with lived experience, we can create something moving and beautiful. It may not be #OwnVoices, but it does show that good representation is powerful in many forms.

I do like the authenticity of an #OwnVoices story, as there is something powerful and moving, something incredibly meaningful about reading someone’s story about their own experiences. Yet, I think Suzy has done an excellent job here to capture Paige’s experience. It means that this is a story that can be heard and shared, and I do think it was all handled very well, so it will be interesting to see everyone else receives it.  

Disability can feel isolating at times, as Jane says in her note about working with Suzy. There are times you’re never sure who will be there for you or who will understand. Times you never know who will pull away, because that or pity seems like the easiest option. But there is hope through the new friends and support that Paige finds as the novel moves on and she starts to gain confidence and an understanding of what she can do, and finds new ways of creating the art she loves. I think this was a beautiful aspect. It shows that there is no limit to how we can create with our minds, hearts and hands. That there are many ways to paint and experience the world. And the people who see what we create and the meaning within it are the ones who help give the art meaning and power. And, real is always more fun than perfect!