Books With Deaf Characters Post 3 – Feathers
Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson is a Newbery Honor book. It being only an ‘honor’ and not a ‘winner’, does that mean nobody has to die in it? I wasn’t sure.
It opened with a quote from Emily Dickinson, so that wasn’t promising.
But then I found it’s set in 1971 in an all-black school, so at that point, I figured it was entirely possible that was all that was needed for the ‘honor’, and nobody had to die. Not far into it, the main character gets unaccountably sad and that was a warning sign to me. And then we learn about her mother losing a baby and subsequently having difficult pregnancies that did not end well. So when her mother ends up pregnant again.. well, I was sure she was a goner.
The main character/narrator is a girl, who we know isn’t a teenager, but whose exact age I didn’t know until nearly the last page of the book. It was hard for me to figure out how old the characters were, because they certainly acted like teenagers a lot of the time. I was ultimately guessing she had to be 12, which would make her older brother about 14 or 15. Turns out I wasn’t far off, as she’s 11 and a half.
A new kid comes to school who looks white, and acts a bit strange. The narrator kept calling him ‘calm’. One of the kids decides he looks rather like Jesus, so everyone starts calling him that. And one girl thinks he might really be Jesus.
The deaf character in the story is the main character’s (whose name is Frannie, I suppose I should say) older brother, Sean. He can read lips some and speak some, but mostly uses sign, which Frannie is fluent in, being a younger sister. And which his parents know as well. Even his grandmother understands him pretty well, though she claims she was too old to learn a new language when he came along.
This book isn’t exactly heavy on the plot. At the end, we learn why the white boy claims not to be a white boy, and he starts to seem like a normal kid to everyone and fit in at school. He knows ASL without knowing why he knows ASL, and the narrator has a guess about the reasons behind that by the end.
In the end, the book was less depressing than I cynically expected. A quick, light read for someone my age. I’d recommend it to a 10-13 year old if I thought they might like it. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy it for one.
Deaf Character: 14 year old black boy, goes to a special school in the neighborhood, knows some other deaf kids, can lipread and speak some, knows ASL.
Relationship to Main Character: Older brother
Genre of Book: Historical fiction
Age Level of Book: Children’s (Tween)
