High School

Different Ways of Being

Alan Balter

From Linkville Press: For Willa and Robert, it‘s a quiet time. The sky takes on a greenish hue, and great bolts of lightning zigzag overhead. The rumble of thunder vibrates through the floor, and trees bend against the wind. Hailstones, some the size of marbles, pepper the windows and fracture on the driveway and sidewalks. Shutters flap against the siding. Soon, the street is littered with tree branches, roofing shingles, and assorted trash. A riderless tricycle blows by in odd concert with a trash can and a soccer ball. The noise is considerable, but for Willa and Robert, it‘s a quiet time. It‘s always a quiet time. So begins Different Ways of Being, Alan Balter‘s strong and sensitive novel about people who are Deaf. Willa and Robert are congenitally deaf and members of the Deaf Culture. They communicate with American Sign Language and prefer to socialize with other Deaf rather than interact with people who hear. For them, deafness is not a disability; thus, they don‘t want to hear any more than hearing people want to be deaf. They consider marriages between deaf and hearing people to be "mixed marriages" that are destined to fail. So strong are the beliefs of members of the Deaf Culture that many would choose to abort a pregnancy rather than have a hearing child.

Freak City

Kathrin Schrocke

Mika‘s heart is broken, until he sees Leah. A smart, beautiful, and brave girl, Leah has been deaf since birth. When Mika meets her for the first time, he feels something electric. They cannot communicate much, so Mika decides to take a sign language course. His family and friends are skeptical, and Mika soon grows weary, too. The world of deaf people is so much different than his own. Can their two worlds intersect? There is also Sandra, Mika’s ex-girlfriend, who he cannot seem to get over. But Mika cannot shake that Leah has captured his heart. . . . Author Kathrin Schrocke tells the story of two teens and their tender, quirky, and extraordinary love.

Invisible (Series)

Cecily Paterson

Jazmine Crawford doesn’t make decisions. She doesn’t make choices. She doesn’t make friends. Jazmine only wants one thing: to be invisible. It’s a lot easier to take out her hearing aid and drift along pretending that nothing’s wrong than it is to admit that she’s heartbroken.

Being in the school drama production is the first thing that‘s made thirteen year old Jazmine feel alive and happy in years. But to keep her part, and her new friends, she‘ll have to hurdle the barrier of her deafness, stand up to the school bully and face the truth about what really happened to her dad.

Silence

Deborah Lytton

STELLA was born to sing. Someday Broadway. But everything changed when a tragic accident renders her deaf; she cannot hear, much less sing. Trapped in a strange new world of total silence, she must face not only the loss of her friends, her hopes, and her voice but also the loss of her identity and her life‘s purpose. Who is she is she‘s not a singer?

HAYDEN is a quiet loner, an outcast, and the only person Stella can communicate with; his profound stutter makes him speak so slowly, she is able to easily read his lips. As they find new ways to communicate despite their disabilities, their friendship grows into an unexpected—but welcome—romance. But is it a romance that can last if Stella regains her hearing and resumes her former life?

Alternating between Stella‘s and Hayden‘s points of view, Silence is a lyrical story of self-discovery, romance, and resilience, of two souls learning how to find their voices and break through the silence.

Smelly Hearing Aids and Fishy Lips: A deaf teenager‘s journal

Marc Heyez

Egg Flounder is your average teenage boy in all ways except for one thing: he is deaf. This is Egg’s journal of his “floundering” attempts to live in a hearing world: taking speech lessons from old Mrs. Tautog so not to sound like a “Frenchman with a cold”, coping with loud whistling hearing aids, squinting to lip-read his girlfriend in a dark disco and many other hilarious misfortunes. We are treated with Egg’s absurd and surrealistic philosophical musings, his ad-libbed school presentations and just plain wonderings, such as why the biblical Adam is portrayed as having a belly button?

True Biz

By Sara Novic

True biz (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever.

This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.

Resources

Interview with the author (ASL and English)

Reading Guide

Until I’m Safe

Jane Grace

Does she stay and possibly get shot by her crazed father or run into the storm of the century, Hurricane Katrina?

Marguerite Aucoin has no choice but to run! Like the fiction heroine she writes about, a teen named Toots Gentry, Marguerite must be brave, despite the fact she’s lost both hearing aids and is virtually deaf.

Amand rescues Marguerite from the swirling bayou waters. At his home, she awakes but doesn’t speak, writing her name, Toots Gentry. With time, he learns her secrets, and discovers someone’s trying to kill her. But’s he’s fallen in love with Marguerite and is determined to protect her.

Waiting for a Sign

by Esty Schachter

Shelly and Ian used to be close, but after Ian leaves home to attend the Hawthorne School for the Deaf, Shelly feels abandoned, and the two drift apart.

When Ian returns home with news that the future of Hawthorne is in jeopardy, Shelly isn’t sure she wants him back. And Ian, who has enjoyed living with students and staff who sign all the time, feels angry when his family forgets to do the same.

An explosive argument that could drive brother and sister further apart actually offers hope for reconciliation—a hope that grows as Shelly’s spirited best friend, Lisa, helps strengthen their bond.

The siblings grow closer still when they find themselves coping with an unexpected tragedy. To fully heal her relationship with Ian, however, Shelly needs to acknowledge and understand why Hawthorne—and access to the Deaf community—is so important to him. To do so, she’ll need to take action and stop waiting for a sign.

Written by clinical social worker Esty Schachter, Waiting for a Sign celebrates the beauty and power of Deaf culture, offering readers an opportunity for insight and understanding.

The Wishing Pearl

Nicole O‘Dell

Join conflicted sixteen-year-old Olivia Mansfield on her journey to hope and healing as she leaves her messed-up life behind and moves into Diamond Estates, a home for troubled teens. This brand-new novel for teen girls will not only entertain, but also promises to capture your heart and challenge your faith.

The Words in My Hands

Asphyxia

Set in an ominously prescient near future, The Words in My Hands is the story of Piper: sixteen, smart, artistic, and rebellious, she’s struggling to conform to what her mom wants—for her to be ‘normal,’ to pass as hearing, and get a good job. But in a time of food scarcity, environmental collapse, and political corruption, Piper has other things on her mind—like survival.

Deaf since the age of three, Piper has always been told that she needs to compensate in a world that puts those who can hear above everyone else. But when she meets Marley, a whole new world opens up—one where Deafness is something to celebrate rather than hide, and where resilience and hope are created by taking action, building a community, and believing in something better.

Published to rave reviews as Future Girl in Australia (Allen & Unwin, Sept. 2020), this unforgettable story is told through a visual extravaganza of text, paint, collage, and drawings that bring Piper’s journey vividly to life. Insightful, hopeful, and empowering, The Words in My Hands is very much a novel for our turbulent times.

You’re Welcome, Universe

Whitney Gardner

When Julia finds a slur about her best friend scrawled across the back of the Kingston School for the Deaf, she covers it up with a beautiful (albeit illegal) graffiti mural.

Her supposed best friend snitches, the principal expels her, and her two mothers set Julia up with a one-way ticket to a “mainstream” school in the suburbs, where she’s treated like an outcast as the only deaf student. The last thing she has left is her art, and not even Banksy himself could convince her to give that up.

Out in the ’burbs, Julia paints anywhere she can, eager to claim some turf of her own. But Julia soon learns that she might not be the only vandal in town. Someone is adding to her tags, making them better, showing off—and showing Julia up in the process. She expected her art might get painted over by cops. But she never imagined getting dragged into a full-blown graffiti war.

Told with wit and grit by debut author Whitney Gardner, who also provides gorgeous interior illustrations of Julia’s graffiti tags, You’re Welcome, Universe introduces audiences to a one-of-a-kind protagonist who is unabashedly herself no matter what life throws in her way.