I love reading books with Deaf and hard-of-hearing characters. I want to read them and any that are recommended, I read. I do this because I want to see my experiences, my culture, within a book and relate to a character.
If I take it book and solely review it on is it a true representation of a Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing character, it is an excellent book.
During reading the book, I found myself constantly nodding my head, signing "that, that, that," and feeling validated that my experiences are in the book and I could fully relate to the character.
The author, Anna Sortino, does a wonderful job showing different forms of ableism including a particularly rough section of police brutality against a BIPOC Deaf boy - illustrating both the struggles that Deaf face when dealing with legal issues, as well as racism. As a note, if this is triggering for you, please skip.
The story is follows Lilah, camp sign name,"Bug", a hard-of-hearing 17 year old who wears hearing aids. Her family doesn't know sign language, and she is very much within the hearing world (mainstream school, hearing friends, etc.) but feels like she doesn't belong. When she was younger, she went to a Deaf and Blind Camp (Gray Wolf) and learned a little ASL there. Nostalgic and searching for her identity, she applies to be a Junior Counselor to the camp.
At the camp, she begins to truly experience the Deaf life - she takes out her hearing aids and continues to work on her sign language for communication. She also has a crush on a deaf boy, Isaac, who remembers her from previous years. She still struggles to fit in some as she thinks she's not "deaf enough" but begins to accept her deafness and have "Deaf pride" - going as far at the end to remind her friends that she's deaf and requests different accessibilities (front seat in the car, etc.) so she can hang around them and not struggle as much with understanding them.
I loved the synopsis of the story.
I didn't love its moralistic aspect.
Throughout the book, it is a constant dialogue of "hearing creators shouldn't be teaching ASL" and "hearing creators are only using ASL for clout." There is absolutely a valid point to this discussion. This is a big issue within the Deaf Community. Yet, I don't want to read this within my book. I read to escape real life, I don't necessarily want the drama of real life constantly forced in my face in the book. This reads very preachy. To top it off, at the end, when Camp Gray Wolf is trying to raise funds and needs to get a message out, the Deaf campers/counsellors go to the hearing creator and ask her to promote the camp, which was hypocritical to me.
Additionally, another big topic for the Deaf Community is regarding cochlear implants. At the beginning of the book, it is constantly talking about that they are bad, the community hates them, etc. But I will say the author does a fairly decent turnaround by adding that the implant itself isn't the issue thing, but rather, hearing parents forcing it on the children and not giving them a choice- or access to ASL and the Deaf community - is the issue.
The story is promising but overall, the writing felt rushed on the story and seemed simplistic (making the character read younger than they are) and yet continuously brought up large issue topics within the Deaf community. The summer camp romance story is a common trope that is perfect to escape during the summer - and this story simply had disabled characters (Deaf and Blind) added into the regular trope; making the story still have the familiar feel but where a Deaf person could truly connect to a character; however, it felt like the story wasn't truly there. It didn't feel whole but rather just a constant telling of Deaf representation and struggles, rather than showing it throughout the story.
If you would like to read and see accurate representation of the Deaf culture and experiences, then this book would be good for educational purposes. However, for pleasure and escapism reading, this book fell flat and didn't feel like it was a real story.
Happy Reading!
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