At a School for the Deaf, Signs of Change Are Clear

Because the novel begins, Charlie has disappeared with one other scholar, the assured and well-liked Austin, throwing the campus into disaster. Austin’s father is a listening to A.S.L. interpreter, and Austin is fifth-generation deaf on his mom’s facet. He “had a charmed childhood surrounded by signal language and individuals who cherished him fiercely, and grew into the type of bubbly, confident boy one may be provided that he feels wholly understood, the prized baby of the tricounty deaf neighborhood.” However then Austin’s child sister is born listening to. He watches his father “curate playlists of youngsters’s songs on his telephone, shush and whisper issues as he rocked Skylar to sleep,” and begins to really feel excluded and disillusioned for the primary time.

February Waters, the varsity’s headmistress, is a CODA, or baby of deaf adults. She’s listening to however indicators fluently, and he or she’s below stress: Her mom is in decline with dementia, her listening to spouse suspects February of rekindling a romance with Wanda — an outdated flame who’s a brand new (married) instructor on the college — and the varsity is threatened with closure. The closing of River Valley would strand her college students with out enough schooling, and she will’t work out how you can battle it. When she confides in her interesting deaf ex, Wanda is unsurprised. Wanda, February realizes, understands what it’s “to face guard towards an encroaching enemy for therefore lengthy, to look at the cavalry barreling towards you and be helpless to cease it.”

Charlie, February and Austin have all been insulated from that risk of cultural extinction: February as a result of she’s listening to, Charlie as a result of she’s blind to deaf historical past and Austin as a result of he’s from a protecting deaf household and in a great college. As the varsity closure looms and Charlie’s implant breaks down, they every face annoyed rage on the disregard for his or her neighborhood.

Novic’s earlier novel, “Lady at Warfare,” was additionally about precarious and threatened id: Ana Juric is 10 in the course of the warfare within the Balkans in 1991. A decade later, at N.Y.U., having misplaced her accent, she tells individuals she grew up in New Jersey, so she doesn’t have to speak in regards to the horrors she skilled: “It was simpler that approach — for them — I advised myself.” However dwelling between two worlds can really feel like dwelling nowhere, and accommodating individuals who can’t fathom your expertise is exhausting.

Charlie, too, finds herself between identities. Feeling misplaced, she reaches out to her older, weed-dealing hookup from public college, however the hazard he presents just isn’t what we — or Charlie — count on. In her newly stoked anger and political awakening, Charlie leads Austin to the margins of town, with February and Wanda, more and more alarmed, on their path.