The Quick Cut: A deaf girl has to adjust when her family moves to Colorado her senior year of high school and ends up in a hearing school. Drama ensues when she struggles to trust hearing people attempt friendships with her.
A Real Review:
Thank you to Blink for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Life is complex enough when you have control of all five senses, but how do you cope without one? Is change impossible or just that much more complex? The story of Maya runs through those feelings as she moves to a new school.
Maya lost her hearing due to meningitis and has been a proud member of the deaf community ever since. She's spent so much time in her deaf school that it has become the comfy, happy safe place she depended on. Unfortunately, life and its changing plans moves her to a new state without a deaf school - forcing her to adjust to a hearing school and her constant companion of an interpreter. However, when a popular boy at school named Beau shows an interest and even learns ASL - she is immediately suspicious. Will she learn to trust others and love ger new environment or buck the trend forever.
Spoiler alert: Maya is very unlikable. While I can attempt to sympathize and understand her perspective, she spends most of her time judgemental as all he'll while refusing to meet others in the middle. She thinks that anyone who doesn't know of the deaf community is ignorant fools and quickly discounts them. This type of approach leaves her looking like the bad guy (appropriately so). She's made it nearly impossible to know her unless you are exactly like her.
That being said, the book is still a fun read. You see the struggles of a deaf person's life and how they attempt to adjust to a world that largely ignores them. It certainly opens your eyes when the required disability devices are unavailable and no alternative is given... Leaving a person stranded. Seeing each complexity and write off made me feel for the struggle of every day life.
Beau is the romantic interest here and truthfully, I spent a large percentage of the book wondering why. He's sweet, sensitive, and smart while Maya is flat out rude and abbrasive to him. He ends up looking like a hero each time he attempts to reach out to Maya and she slaps him down with no questions.
I don't mean to be horrendous about Maya, especially since life can't be easy. The issue is that she's abbrasive and never explains herself or attempts emotional honesty. Start to finish, her walls are up and the mystery of her pessimism stays that way. There's no progress here and that ruins it here because this ends up sounding like an infomercial on deaf struggles.
An interesting tale weighed down by an unlikable and one dimensional heroine.
My rating: 3 out of 5