by Sara Nović
Overall: This book was a great balance of fun and learning for me. Told from the perspective of several different characters, it chronicles life at the River Valley School for the Deaf over the course of about a year. Charlie, a teenage girl with a cochlear implant that has never worked correctly, has just entered RVSD. Although she doesn’t miss life at the large public high school she just left, she’s not quite sure how to fit in at her new school, either. February, a CODA (child of deaf adults) who is now the school’s headmistress, and Austin, another student whose family has had deaf members for generations, attempt to help Charlie adapt to life at RVSD while managing their own chaotic lives.
Likes: this book taught me a lot about Deaf culture and life as a member of a Deaf community without being preachy or lecturing. The use of art throughout to illustrate ASL and BASL added a lot to the narrative. The characters all felt complex and real; everyone, not just the teenagers, made good, bad, and questionable decisions, and had to live with the consequences of their actions. Life is messy and sometimes the “right” answer is hard to find (or doesn’t exist, or changes depending on the circumstances), and this book captured that beautifully. And as the parent of a teenager, I thought Nović did a fantastic job capturing the quirks and beauty of this stage of life!
Dislikes: a couple of times a character briefly took over the narrative for a single chapter. I wished these characters had either had additional chapters, or that Nović had just told these parts of the story from one of the existing narrator’s perspectives. But this is a minor criticism – overall, I thought the narrative structure of the book worked really well!
FYI: references to violence against children, sexual assault. A few brief sex scenes. Drug use. Death of a parent. Attempted acts of terrorism.
Liz Helfrich 