Books with Deaf Characters Post 4 – Changes for Julie
Changes for Julie is an American Girl book. Which takes precedence over the author and illustrator, apparently, because their names appear nowhere on the cover. Megan McDonald and Robert Hunt respectively.
This is a book that catches my attention more than for the deaf character. What with the Julie and the 1974. Except, oddly, this takes place in 1976, not 1974. If you’re going to be specific, then shouldn’t you stick to 1974?
I didn’t realize at first that this is a later book in a series about Julie and the 70′s. There are hints as I read, to a previous struggle to get onto the boys’ basketball team, but even that, I didn’t peg it for being more than the second or third in a series. Turns out it’s book 6!
So, granted, maybe I shouldn’t be randomly reading book 6 in a series, but still, the author should’ve made an earlier attempt to tell me that it took place in San Francisco (or at least some hint it was California), and maybe made it a little plainer that her parents were divorced. Don’t go assuming I know things like that, especially when they’re fairly important things.
The style is too childish for me. Some exclamation points where they really don’t belong! Because the narration is really not that exciting! If you see what I mean! And just a few other things where things are spelled out a little too clearly, just word-wise, and style-wise.
The plot? Well, Julie is running for student body president. Yea, if you’ve seen one sitcom about that, you’ve seen plenty. The twist? Well, her running mate is deaf. If you call that a twist.
At one point, Julie thinks she’d win if she dropped Joy as her veep, but she does the right thing and keeps her on. And all due to Julie, the mean girls in the class and thus the whole school find out Joy’s just another girl and hey, why don’t we vote for Julie after all?
Joy is mainstreamed, can sign, and can lipread, and speak. And she’s in fifth grade. There is no mention of her going to speech therapy classes or anything like that. There’s no mention of a hearing aid. She’s just really super, super awesome, I guess, because she seems to have very little trouble understanding everyone. Just the teacher, a little bit, at the beginning. The mean teacher, who gives the two of them detention when Julie tries to explain something the teacher said.
Maybe you can tell I don’t think much of this book. It’s a little too ‘hey, there was an election in 1976′ and ‘mainstreaming disabled kids rocks’.
Which is a shame, because when I look at the list of American Girls at the front of the book, I’d really like to get to know some of them. But I suspect they make for much better movies than books. Fortunately for me, I guess, there are movies.
Deaf Character: 5th grade white girl (so about 10?), mainstreamed, lipreader, speaker, signer
Relationship to Main Character: Friend
Genre of Book: Historical
Reading Level of Book: 3rd grade-ish (annoyingly so)
K Said,
October 28, 2009 @ 11:16 am
If you were familiar with the American Girl books, you’d know that the core series for each character is generally identical as to titles, so ‘Changes for X’ is always #6. But they don’t really play up the order too much, even though the books are really a sequential series.
Jellyn Said,
October 28, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Oh really? That’s interesting. I mean to see if we have any other Julie books.