Books with Deaf Characters Post 6 – Dovey Coe
Just a warning up front that I’m going to spoil the heck out of this book.
Dovey Coe by Frances O’Roark Dowell is about a 12-year old girl named Dovey Coe. It takes place in the mountains of North Carolina, I think. And in my first read-through, I totally missed the rather obvious in retrospect way the author told me what year it was. It takes place in the late 1920′s. So another one of those regional, historical books where a kid dies. It won The Edgar Allan Poe Award, but appears to have missed out on the Newbery. Rotten luck, that.
Dovey’s got a 16-year old sister who’s pretty and flirts with boys, but has some brains and wants to leave their small town to go to teacher’s college. She strings along the rich, spoiled, mean brat of a boy Parnell all summer. So when he incredibly publically proposes to her, and she turns his down flat, he’s quite hurt. And goes drinking.
Meanwhile Dovey’s older brother of 13, Amos, is deaf. And he has two dogs. So Parnell kidnaps one of the dogs and tells Dovey to come get it. He threatens the dog with a brick, she pulls out her jackknife, and before Dovey knows it, the dog is dead and Parnell is dead, but she was unconscious when this last part happened.
So then she’s put on trial for murder with a newbie cityslicker lawyer who’s rather incompetent.
Of course, in the end, it was her deaf brother Amos who killed Parnell. Because if there’s a murder in a book and a deaf character in a book, the deaf character had better be the victim, the murderer, or at least the prime suspect for a good long time.
Anyhow.. more about Amos. He’s a year older than Dovey, but Dovey feels like she has to take care of him. She’s (supposedly) the one who taught him how to read and write and read lips. Mm-hmm. They don’t appear to have any home signs between them, though Amos does have a few hand gestures to talk to the dogs. Though the only one we learn about specifically is three handclaps to tell them to go find something.
Amos is a part of the family, even though he can only talk to them by writing notes, which we barely see any of going on. So I get the impression he’s not a full member of the family, involved in two-way conversation with all of them. The community at large doesn’t know what to make of him. Parnell makes out like the community thinks he’s crazy.
At the end of the book, the older sister sends word from her teacher’s college that she found a book about sign language and talked to someone and they said Amos could learn this sign language and then teach it to other deaf people. So a happy ending for Amos, where he gets to go be a teacher to the deaf in the nebulous future beyond the end of the book.
I don’t know how likely that is. In the 1930′s? A deaf teacher teaching deaf students? Teaching sign language? Not a whole lot of job openings for that, I’m thinking.
I can’t hate the book, as at least Dovey isn’t a typical girly girl and is resisting attempts to turn her into one. But at least the book is short, so I didn’t have to spend too much time with this whole silly trial thing.
Oh yea, and Dovey learns a lesson at the end! That maybe her brother can take care of her, rather than the other way around. What with killing Parnell to defend her and all. Y’know.
Deaf Character: 13-year old white boy. Can read, write, lipread English, but not speak. Doesn’t sign.
Relationship to Main Character: Older brother
Genre of Book: Historical
Reading Level of Book: Tweens
