Books with Deaf Characters Post 7 - Singing Hands
Singing Hands by Delia Ray. Yet another historical fiction. I begin to think deaf people only existed in the past! This one takes place a couple years after WW2, in Alabama. For those keeping score on how many are Southern.
Gussie (Augusta) is a hearing girl with two hearing sisters and two deaf parents. Her father's a minister and travels all around to local and not-so-local deaf churches to preach and other ministerly things. You could call Gussie a mischievous girl, but when she steals a key to let herself into a tenant's room to steal her dead husband's clothes and instead steals a private love letter, I had no sympathy for her whatsoever. And why did she do it? To pull a prank on her sister. Or maybe because she's bored.
She's caught humming at church by a visiting hearing man and her father decides that means she'd feel more at home in a hearing church, so he sends her and one of her sisters there on their own. After the first Sunday goes badly, Gussie keeps the money meant for the offering envelope and skips out on Sunday school to go buy sodas.
Then she takes it one step further and steals money directly from her father. And again, my sympathy is not with her.
So as punishment, she can't go visit her aunt, but instead has to go to the Alabama School for the Deaf for a celebration. And now her bucking-the-rules streak actually isn't so bad, because she helps the poor little deaf black boy and the poor little deaf students who aren't allowed to sign. And.. hrm, I think my opinion of this book is clear to me now.
Good parts: There are many deaf characters. Mostly white, but a couple black. All ages. It makes it clear how it was even harder for a deaf person if they were also black.
Bad parts: I wondered why Gussie didn't feel she was fluent in sign. And I had a lot of trouble liking her. A lot of trouble. She was an insensitive jerk a lot of the time!
At the end of the book, the author talks about how this is partly based on her mother's family. Her grandfather was a deaf minister who did a lot of traveling. What's sad is that it seems like the author never learned a lot of sign. Shouldn't her mother have been fluent? And grr, why do parents pass up the chance to let their kids be bilingual? Just freaking talk to your kids in all the languages you're conversant in!!
Rant, rant, rant. Okay. I'm done. I shouldn't judge. I don't know a lot about them and their lives. Anyway...
Deaf Characters: Many. All ages. Mostly white. Two black, who didn't sign very well. Everyone else signs and the main(er) characters also speak and lipread pretty well.
Relationship to Main Character: Parents, neighbors, parents' friends, et al
Genre of Book: Historical
Reading Level of Book: Children's/Tweens
