A coming-of-age story that explores the complexities of community and the ways in which language defines us.
The author of America Is Immigrants (2019) and Girl at War (2015) goes deep into Deaf culture.
True biz is an expression in American Sign Language that has a variety of English translations—“for sure,” “seriously,” “no joke,” and “totally” among them. By using this phrase as her title, the author is underscoring the point that ASL is not just English rendered in hand gestures. It is, instead, a language with its own grammar, its own idioms, and its own stylistic flourishes. This presents Charlie Serrano with a challenge. The child of hearing parents, Charlie has a cochlear implant and has barely mastered the ASL alphabet when she transfers from her public high school to River Valley School for the Deaf. Headmistress February Waters—the hearing child of deaf parents—asks Austin Workman to help Charlie acclimate to her new environment. The fifth generation of his family to be deaf, Austin is something like aristocracy within his community. All of these characters are about to have a very tumultuous year. Nović is deaf, and her second novel might be regarded as part of the movement for stories about marginalized groups to be written by people who are themselves part of that group. Nović addresses a lot of topics here, from eugenics and racism to teen romance and middle-aged marital strife. The resulting narrative has an odd shape. The first half progresses at a very slow pace, and it’s heavy on exposition. Things start moving in the second half, and there’s a lot of action toward the end. The lessons in ASL and Deaf history interspersed throughout the text may keep the reader’s interest more than the story alone would.
A coming-of-age story that explores the complexities of community and the ways in which language defines us.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-24150-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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