Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

I knew (or thought I knew) I’d read a lot of the Tiptree award books/stories since I last updated it. But I was resisting updating it because I don’t have Dreamweaver installed on my new laptop. And with Dreamweaver, I only had to highlight the ones I’d read and change the style.

Well, turns out editing it by hand was pretty darned easy too. It was just adding: class=”read” to the tds. Though my first pass through, I failed to also put it in for the authors. So the titles were the right color, but the authors weren’t.

The most annoying part was adding two year’s worth of lists. Lots of tedious typing.

But, I’m done! You can look at my list of which books/stories I’ve read of the Tiptree winners right over here somewhere. Still plenty I have not read. A few of the ones there that I haven’t marked, I have tried to read, and failed. Maybe they should get their own color.

More Voyager later. I still have some on the Tivo to watch. But Spike has been messing with the schedule, so who knows when or if I’ll be able to resume after I finish the.. 8, I think, that I have left on the Tivo. Stupid Spike. In other news, I have Torchwood and all of the Highlander TV series on DVD. Which I may need, since the new Fall season has been a big disappointment.

Anyway, onward! To my review of two Halloween books that didn’t have “Halloween” in the title, so I couldn’t review them over on Triple Take.

Oh, wow, lie! This does have Halloween in the title. Whoopsy.

Old Witch Rescues Halloween by Wende and Harry Devlin (1972)

I grabbed this because it looked familiar. But after having read it, it didn’t really ring any bells. Maybe I read other books in the series?

Rich white guy declares there won’t be Halloween, and people listen to him, because he’s rich. And a white guy. But Old Witch is having none of that. So he kidnaps her and locks her up. But a crow helps her get a broom. And then she shows up at his rally, or whatever. And he dumps his pitcher of water on her!!

But, fortunately, she doesn’t melt. Fyew.

She turns him into a frog. She rallies the townsfolk to fight for Halloween. Then turns him back. And he’s all ‘yay halloween’. And then they have a party.

And it’s really kind of a weird narrative (ack, I just used the word narrative in a sentence) because there’s this sort of detachment from Old Witch, who seems to be the protagonist. She doesn’t say a whole lot. She sings a little song, she talks to herself and the crow (9 words total there), she chants a spell. Then she’s got 2 lines to psyche up the crowd. And then like 4 words at the end of the book. None of what she says is part of an actual conversation.

It does add to the picture of her as the eccentric old woman who nobody in the town talks to and then hangs as a witch. Except.. she seems to have friends, and the townsfolk aren’t against her.

In the end, a better book than some of the other ones I read.

The Candy Witch by Steven Kroll (1979)

I saw this on the booksale rack at the library and I was all ‘I remember that book!’ I flipped through it briefly and decided ‘I liked this book!’ I didn’t buy it quickly enough before it vanished. (I had had a brief thought that I should save it for some other kid to find and love.)

But then later I saw it in the children’s room, sans dust jacket, but in recognizable orange with the candy witch embossed in a corner of the cover. Hurray for books that don’t require a dust jacket to be recognizable.

Maggie is a witch, in a family of witches (and warlocks). She likes sticking candy in people’s pockets and filling fridges with food, but her family doesn’t notice the good deeds she does. So she gets fed up and sets out to get noticed. She starts playing tricks on people. Lizards out of bathroom faucets, frogs in pockets, milk turning into flowers. Nothing too malicious or dangerous, but not very nice either.

But her family still doesn’t notice! So she waits until all the kids have gone trick or treating and then steals their candy bags. They get sad. She feels remorse. She talks to her family. Then she throws a candy festival to make it all better.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what appealed to me about this as a kid, but I’ll try.

The colors of the book are shades of orange, black, and purple. It’s really inspired, I think. Perfect for a Halloween book. Maggie is drawn so simply I think even I could reproduce her. So definitely accessible and appealling artwork all around.

She sticks candy in people’s pockets! And there’s one scene where she has all the trick or treat bags piled up on a rooftop with her. What’s not to love about that? Candy!!

Unfortunately, with my 2010 old-fogey eyes, I did notice a flaw. There’s two questionable costumes the kids are wearing. One’s dressed as the typical ‘Indian chief’ and another looks to be a gypsy fortune-teller. If this book were to be republished today, I hope they would skillfully modify or excise those two, but leave the rest of the book untouched.

I find it a little odd that the costumes are all generic. That is, there’s no Spiderman or C3PO. But the candy specifically references Hershey’s kisses and M&M’s. Also, who has peppermints and jelly beans on Halloween? Weirdos! And she’s got fountains of lemonade at her party. Lemonade and candy? Gross. Why wasn’t it apple cider?

Anyway, I still love this book. And that’s why I had to review it somewhere. And that’s why I’m kind of sad I didn’t buy it from the booksale after all.

I’ve been writing reviews on Goodreads as I finish books and then posting them to facebook. K is lazy and has also BLOCKED Goodreads updates on Facebook.

So, for her, and anyone else who’s interested, here’s a link to my Goodreads profile.

Will I add it to my sidebar? Will I get it to feed to my blog? My lj? Stay tuned.

But don’t hold your breath.

River of Hands is a small book of 4 short stories written by deaf children. Well, young adults really. Two of the stories are completely original, the other two are variations on stories that are frequently told among Deaf people.. in Canada and the US, apparently. Since this book is a Canadian book. But as most of Canada uses American Sign Language, I suppose it makes sense.

Each story has deaf characters in it — the two original stories have Deaf kids as the main characters. And those are the two stories I much preferred. One is about a couple of boys who go fishing in the toilet. Hey, boys have to amuse themselves somehow, right? The other is about two girls who make friendship bracelets out of cursed beads. This one uses the ‘was it all a dream?’ trope, but I’ve found you have to forgive that in kids. Heck, it’s not like I’ve never done it myself!

Since there is signing in the stories, some of the stories have illustrations of some of the key signs afterwards. The fish story has a fish showing us the signs for fishing! Bet you didn’t know fish had hands and fingers, did you?

Yes, the stories are written by kids, and they’re pretty short, but I did like this book for what it was. Two fishy thumbs up.

Discovering Friendship by Sharona Kadish, illustrated by Dee DeRosa, is a picturebook.

A hearing girl tells the story of a new girl at school who’s ‘hearing impaired’ and how the two quickly (very quickly!) become best friends.

I was going to be rather harsh on this one, but then I got to the end and the About the Author section. Turns out this was written by a girl in sixth grade. She won a contest to get it turned into a book. Of course she’s in her late 20′s now, but still. Kudos to her for A) Writing a book and B) Winning a contest.

So considering the author and that it was published in 1994, it’s not bad. But as for whether I’d recommend it to someone today? No. Not as a book about a deaf kid. Maybe as a book written by a kid. To point at and say ‘Look, you can do that too!’.

One problem is that the girl is always called ‘hearing impaired’. So I can’t even tell if she’s deaf or hard of hearing. Though she does sign, so I lean towards Deaf, whichever she is. ‘Hearing impaired’ may sound PC, but it’s not a preferred term. If it ever was.

She wears a hearing aid with wires that probably lead to a battery pack. The hearing aid is never mentioned, so that’s only in the artwork. So, just a bit of dated illustration.

The story itself is simplistic and cheesy. Sappy. Bit preachy. If the story had developed over the course of months rather than days to the point where she’s chatting away in sign language and buying a ‘best friends’ necklace, it would seem a little more realistic and a little less corny.

If you’re looking for books to buy or to check out of the library, give this one a pass.

I’m so out of things, I never would’ve known Wil Wheaton had another book out if K hadn’t told me. In this book, he collects summaries he wrote for TV Squad of first season Star Trek: TNG eps. It’s summary, it’s snark, it’s reminiscences, it’s geek.

At first I thought this would be a quick read, but when I started reading, I changed my mind about that. It has to be read slowly, to appreciate all the jokes. And to take the humor in small doses.

But then I changed my mind again. The episodes after the first couple didn’t seem as funny. I don’t think it’s really because they were less funny, but more that he’d lost my sense of newness and surprise by that point. Which is a key component of humor. But of course I plowed ahead anyway. It ended up being a very quick read for me.

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I’m the one who suggested we read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, for October, in the spirit of Halloween. So of course it figures that I’m the last one to finish it, and not until December. It was a hard slog. Not quite as hard as Point of Hopes, but less things compelling me to keep reading. I definitely would’ve abandoned it after a few pages if I wasn’t obligated to keep going.

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Well, what to make of this book. Heat Wave is written by fictional character, Richard Castle, from the television show, Castle. That’s not even quite the weird part. The book is also pretty much an episode of the television show, just with all the characters slightly changed. Any real author basing a novel so much on real life is likely going to be in a load of trouble with his family and friends.

Let’s.. take this in chunks:

The Writing

I had trouble getting into this book at first. As in, I had trouble at a very basic level in comprehension. It was making my brain hurt. Somewhere along the line, it got easier. I’m inclined to say that the writing got better, but it could simply be that I got used to it. I’m not quite sure, but I do have some examples, and the examples are from early on.

Metaphors and other bits of language that make you stop. And yea, they make you think, and yea, they can be a bit humorous. But they also make you stop. It interrupts the flow.

Page 1: “the tourists were [...] seeking refuge in Starbucks over iced drinks ending in vowels.”
Page 3: “Rook had curled his hands to form skin binoculars”
Page 32: “what looked to her like an escalator to the basement painted red” — to describe a graph

Character name switches. She’s Nikki Heat. She’s Heat. She’s Detective Heat. She’s ‘the detective’. Just when you think the author(s) has finalized on Heat and is going to stick with it, out comes another Nikki Heat or just Nikki. And of course it happens with other characters as well. Sometimes trying to give us information by doing it, like ‘her friend’. As if we couldn’t gather that by context.

Number problems. It happened more than once. Here’s one from page 15: “Two thousand six scrape with a bouncer in SoHo; 2008, you pushed a guy [...]” Did some style rulebook tell you not to start a sentence with a number? Because it’s just plain silly to say 2006 and 2008 in two different ways. Plus just silly to give a year that way in the first place.

Maybe an editor should’ve caught that? problems — page 33

“I see,” he said. And then he took the plunge. “Matthew Starr indulged some personal habits that compromised his personal fortune. He did damage.” Noah paused then took the plunge.

At one point, I had trouble following who was speaking, but looking back through, I can’t find where that was.

There were also times where something was mentioned and I had to try to remember what it was referring to. Specifically the ‘perfume ad’. If you weren’t paying attention the first time Heat’s internal monologue came up with that, you were lost. And since I was already overwhelmed with metaphors and odd little references, I did miss that the first time.

The whole feel of it, especially the dialogue, was quite like the show. If you’re not paying attention, you’re going to miss a quip. Even if you are paying attention, you’ll probably miss some quips. Or my geek repetoire is not geeky enough in the right directions (music, old movies, etc) to get everything.

The Characters

So instead of Castle, the bestselling novelist, we have Rook, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. Who is somehow also fabulously rich. And instead of whatever her name is, the detective on the show, we have Nikki Heat. Who you can reasonably read into as Castle’s impression of who the detective on the show is, whatever her name is. And other characters map as well, including 2 detectives or cops or whatever who do the girl detective’s bidding, but competently. Unlike some shows.

And, inexplicably, Castle/Rook’s mother, the diva. She shows up briefly in one scene, and her appearance was utterly pointless.

The characters are so like the television show, that I was brought up short every time we were reminded that Rook is a journalist. I guess he didn’t fit my image of a journalist. Wise-cracking, risk-taking, devil may care journalist? And, again, rich?

A book written by Castle?

Well, I can sort of see it. At first, I was reading it in my head in Nathan Fillion’s Castle voice, though eventually that dropped off. And yea, you can totally see a guy like him writing a hot detective chick parading around her apartment naked and then kicking butt in that state.

But then I think.. well, a real novelist.. well, a) wouldn’t map his life so closely like that, and b) should know his main character better. That is, I never really felt like I was inhabiting Nikki Heat. So I never felt like the author was either. But I guess that isn’t necessarily indicative of ‘not a real author’, but more of ‘not a very good author’.

Whoa, trippy man

The quote from the back of the book: “Rick Castle must have been doing his research because Nikki Heat has the unmistakable ring of truth.” — It actually got me thinking.. how many things on the show do we see Castle learning about that made it into the book? And I don’t know the answer to that, because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the first season of Castle. Are there clever little things like that?

Summary

Interesting to read for what it is, though if it wasn’t what it is, I wouldn’t have read it. And if I had read it, I would’ve put it down. Because I would’ve found it rather dull. Reading all these mysteries is just confirming to me that I’m not particularly fond of them. (Ignoring that I did go through a stage in my youth of reading most of Sherlock Holmes.)

The acknowledgements deserve acknowledgement for being interesting and a bit amusing.

I’m giving the book a rather solid 3 (out of 5). An overall impression of ‘meh’, yet the compulsion to want to buy a copy and mark it up in red ink to figure out why I had such problems with its language.

The Printer is by Myron Uhlberg. Remember him? Illustrated by Henri Sorensen. Like the other picturebook by Uhlberg that I read, this is based in fact, but is a work of fiction.

It’s about the narrator’s father, who’s a deaf printer at a newspaper in the 1940′s. Some of his coworkers are deaf and some are hearing. So when a fire breaks out, he warns the deaf people first (in the loud printing room, even if he did shout something understandable to his hearing coworkers, they’d be unlikely to hear it). “Fire! Fire! Tell the hearing ones!” They make sure everyone gets out and the father in the story is the last one to leave. It’s a huge fire, given all the paper that’s hanging around waiting to be fuel for it. But no one is hurt and the building’s rebuilt and he gets to go back to work on the new machines.

At the end of the book, Uhlberg tells us some facts about his deaf father and how he grew up, and about working on the printing press of The New York Daily News. There’s also a blurb about ASL. And at the very back is directions to make your own printer’s hat out of newspaper.

What I didn’t understand in this and in his memoir is.. if they needed a newspaper hat to protect their hair from the fine mist of paper dust and ink.. what the heck were they inhaling?!

Deaf Character: White man in his 30s, 40s. In this book, it says he can’t speak. Uses ASL.
Relationship to main character: Well, he really is the main character, but the narrator is his hearing son.
Genre of Book: Historical (of course)
Reading Level of Book: Picturebook

Silent Lotus by Jeanne M. Lee is a picturebook, which proudly proclaims it’s a Reading Rainbow book. Ah, Reading Rainbow… so weird seeing Levar Burton with eyes.

Anyhoo, this takes place ‘Long ago in Kampuchea’ and I have no idea where that is. From the pictures, I’m guessing somewhere near India and/or China. Yes, that’s how globally aware I am. The author was born in Vietnam, so it may be Vietnam.

Lotus is born deaf and mute. Seriously. Doesn’t make a noise as a baby. So, that’s rather unusual there. And her mother invents a sign to show her her name is Lotus, like the flower. But in general, they don’t seem to communicate a whole lot. Lotus doesn’t have any friends. Then they go off to visit a big temple and they see the temple dancers and Lotus starts dancing. So they decide that’s a sign. She’s to be a dancer. So she learns to be a dancer and dances and somehow she magically acquires friends this way. The end.

You may have guessed I don’t think much of this book. It’s just sort of all… eh.

Deaf Character: Little girl, Asian (Vietnamese?). Doesn’t lipread, speak, read, write, or sign. In short, no language.
Relationship to Main Character: She is the main character! (I know, shocker, right?)
Genre of Book: Historical
Reading Level of Book: Picturebook

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

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

I’ve actually just finished reading Hands of My Father which is a memoir by Myron Uhlberg, a hearing guy born to two deaf parents. Which is really good, well-written, and funny, btw. But this post isn’t about that.

He’s also written some children’s books. And Dad, Jackie, and Me is one of them. It’s a picturebook, illustrated by Colin Bootman.

It’s a work of fiction, but it’s based in reality, as the story also appears in non-fictional form in the memoir. He and his father go to all of Jackie Robinson’s games one season and cheer him on. They make a scrapbook. And well, that’s mostly it. A hearing kid, his deaf father, and the connection he feels to this pioneering black baseball player.

At the end, the author writes a nonfiction bit at the end about this connection and about a deaf baseball player in the 1800s.

It’s kind of cool seeing this after reading the memoir. With the pictures and all. Even if I’m not into baseball. Or reading about baseball. And you can’t fault his characterization of the deaf character or sign language or any of that, obviously!

Deaf Character: Middle-aged white man (it doesn’t say it in the story and it is a work of fiction, but Myron Uhlberg’s father was born Jewish), signs, speaks not very well.
Relationship to Main Character: Father
Genre: Historical, sports
Age Level of Book: Picturebook

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)

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)