Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

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.

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)

Words in Our Hands by Ada B. Litchfield and illustrated by Helen Cogancherry was in with the third grade books, but it’s really a picturebook with more than the usual number of words. It’s also a bit outdated, being published in 1980.

It’s mostly a fictional character, Michael, telling us about his deaf parents. The only real plot is they move to a new place, following his father’s job. And once there, they attend a performance by The National Theatre of the Deaf and realize there’s a whole community of people who can understand them when they sign.

His parents were both born deaf, and I question the idea that they were deaf because one’s mother had measles when she was pregnant and the other’s was in an accident when she was pregnant. Not that it isn’t possible, but they’re probably lucky they were born deaf and without any more serious problems.

They were both taught how to speak and to lipread, but they also sign. Hence the title of the book. And their hearing kids, three of them, can all sign.

One of the dated aspects is that the kid’s father makes sure to put two rearview mirrors on the car so he can see better when driving. I think two are pretty much standard now.

The book teaches you how to fingerspell the alphabet, and a few signs. A few, totally, completely, random signs. Really. Noon – Face – In – Stand – 10 – Join – Heart – Night. Those are signs kids erm.. love to learn? They make a perfect sentence about er… standing on someone’s heart and making a face? Whereas the ‘peanut butter sandwich’ we also learn, actually comes up in the ‘story’.

And, not much more to say about it really. It’s a ‘now you know more about what it’s like to have deaf parents’ book, not a book innately interesting in itself.

Deaf Characters: Probably 30-something man and woman, married. Both born deaf. Learned to speak, but can also sign.
Relationship to Main Character: Parents
Genre of Book: Mainstream, educational
Age Level of Book: Picturebook, really

In a fit of utter random impulse I got a bunch of kid’s books out of the library that feature a deaf character strongly enough that ‘deaf’ as a search term called them up in the catalog. I get bored at work easily and it results in getting books for myself. Really bad, as I had class that night, so I was lugging around far more books than I needed to be. Really bad, in that I already had over 40 books checked out. Really bad, in that one of those books aged to ‘lost’ and I actually can’t find the thing.

So we’ll see if I follow through on the impulse. An idea formed at some point that day that I’d read all these books and write up little blurbs, compare and contrast, that sort of thing. I’ve decided to use this blog as the repository for the info. It’ll be interesting to see if I spot any trends, and especially interesting if I spot oversights.

Why kid’s books? Because other than ‘deaf character is suspect in a murder mystery’, I’ve pretty much read most of the adult books at the library that turn up in a ‘deaf’ keyword search. And they’re faster to read.

So without any further ado (and why is it so tempting to write that adieu?), here’s my blurby info review thingee for Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything. (Author: Lenore Look, Illustrator: Anne Wilsdorf)

This is the second book in the series, but it didn’t seem to matter particularly. The library marks this as a third grade reading level book, which seems about right. Ruby Lu is a Chinese-American girl with a little brother. As the book starts, she’s already learning about ‘Immigration’ in a very personal way. Her aunt, uncle, and cousin have come from China and are staying with them.

Flying Duck is the cousin in question and is the deaf character in the book. Flying Duck reads lips — though mostly in Cantonese, as she hasn’t learned much English yet. Flying Duck uses Chinese Sign Language. Ruby Lu’s baby brother starts picking up the sign language faster than her, which annoys the heck out of her, because her cousin can communicate with her baby brother while she can’t.

Most of the book is about Ruby Lu at school, and over the summer, where she goes to the pool, and to summer school. And about a rocky friendship with neighbor Emma. And all the things a girl goes through as a second grader. Flying Duck plays a role as a cohort and while not the main character, is featured quite often.

We learn that Flying Duck could hear until she was 4, when she fell off a roof and ‘burst her skull’. We get to learn how she signed that in Chinese Sign Language too. I think that still makes her lipreading skill a little unbelievable, but not much is made of it. Most of the book, you’re not quite sure how they’re communicating. English? Cantonese? Sign? Or just by being on the same page, where not much communication is actually necessary to do what they’re doing. Playing, for example.

In one chapter, Ruby Lu tells her classmates what they need to know about interacting with a deaf person. She pulls out a couple famous quotes here, though they’re not cited. “The only thing a deaf person can’t do is hear.” and “Never say, ‘Forget it, it’s not important.’”

Though I did wonder how “Get her attention first by calling her name or waving” was going to help. Is she actually hard of hearing rather than profoundly deaf? No hearing aid is ever mentioned.

When they’re in summer school, they both start taking an American Sign Language class. So the glossary at the end, in addition to defining the more difficult English words, also has some Chinese signs, and then one ASL sign.

And what I didn’t notice until page 45! Somehow! Was there’s a little drawing of Flying Duck in the bottom corner of each page. It’s a flipbook. And it’s a good drawing, because I picked out ‘friend’ when I flipped it, without having a clue what sign was going to be in there. It seems to just be ‘friend’ over and over again. A whole sentence would’ve been nice. Oh well.

An interesting book. A cool book. And a funny book. Without having read the other book(s), I’d highly recommend these to any ~3rd graders out there. Ruby Lu is an awesome kid.

Deaf Character: 2nd grader Chinese girl, deafened at age 4. Knows sign.
Relationship to Main Character: Cousin
Genre of Book: Mainstream
Age-level of Book: 3rd grade