Charlie’s already distant relationship with her mother grows worse over time, particularly as she begins learning sign language, to which her mother was always opposed. This device has been faulty for several years-causing her daily physical discomfort-and is also a symbol of her complicated relationship with her mother, who insisted on its implantation when Charlie was a small child. One of the most enduring issues in Charlie’s life is her disdain for her cochlear implant, a device that enables her to perceive sound. Her suspicions are proven true, as she arrives at River Valley overwhelmed by all that she needs to learn about ASL and Deaf history and culture, topics to which she was never exposed. After attending her first ASL class with her father, Charlie quickly realizes that adjusting to her new life will not be easy. She was always enrolled in a mainstream educational setting, but under her father’s custody, Charlie is enrolled in sign language classes and River Valley School for the Deaf, where she will board. Charlie experiences a series of significant life changes due to her parents’ separation. The novel also includes inserted diagrams and informational texts regarding the conventions of ASL and facts about Deaf culture, history, and activism, both as related to the Deaf community and otherwise. Though the novel shifts points of view throughout, moving from one major character to another, Charlie is its central protagonist. This is brilliant.Set in the fictional town of Colson, Ohio, the novel follows Charlie Serrano, a Deaf girl with newly divorced parents. With complex characters seething with rage against the injustices they face, and an immersive and novel treatment of Charlie's experience learning ASL, Nović offers an unforgettable homage to resilience. Circumstances worsen when, one morning, Charlie, Austin, and his roommate go missing from the school. Meanwhile, February has a troubled marriage and must fight against bureaucratic forces that are trying to shut down the school. A romance develops between the two, but Charlie still struggles-her learning is disrupted by her mother's refusal to sign and the frequent headaches caused by the implant. February, determined to make Charlie's language immersion easier, assigns Austin to be Charlie's guide. Instead, her hearing parents forced her to have a cochlear implant. It's centered around the River Valley School for the Deaf and follows three protagonists: headmistress February Waters, a hearing ally of the Deaf community Austin, the school's popular kid who belongs to a generational Deaf family and Charlie, the newly admitted transfer student who struggles to fit in because of her inability to use ASL. Nović ( Girl at War) returns with an electrifying narrative set at a present-day boarding school for Deaf high school students, where they find love and friendship and battle a series of injustices. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection. This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another-and changed forever. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. True biz (adj./exclamation American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Booklist “For those who loved the Oscar-winning film CODA, a boarding school for deaf students is the setting for a kaleidoscope of experiences.”- The Washington Post A “tender, beautiful and radiantly outraged” ( The New York Times Book Review) novel that follows a year of seismic romantic, political, and familial shifts for a teacher and her students at a boarding school for the deaf, from the acclaimed author of Girl at War.
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