Kris L. (miss-info) reviewed on 12/29/2009 + 386 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, Ruth writes the way her parents speak; with the syntax and phrasing of the Deaf. The grammar cop in me rebelled all the way through the book. On the other hand, the story was so interesting I couldn't put it down. I read it in waiting rooms, in the car (not while driving), in every spare minute over the day and a half it took me to finish it. When Ruth told her story, the book was very, very good. When she slipped off into her thoughts and feelings, she got so poetic that I couldn't understand what she was saying. The narration skips back and forth along the timeline a lot as she tells of her life as the hearing child of deaf parents, both of her parents' lives as deaf children of hearing parents, and brief dips into her grandparents' lives as parents of deaf children. Ruth also touches on the awful schooling for the deaf in the early 20th century, her own trouble accepting sound and music, and some bits I hadn't expected about being both deaf and Jewish.

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