True Biz

This story unfolds at Ohio's River Valley School for the Deaf, a boarding school where students come to learn and can count on the cultural richness of the deaf community being celebrated. When Charlie enrolls as a new student, she's never met another deaf student; her parents had kept her in traditional school for far too long, hoping her issues with hearing would simply disappear once they got her cochlear implants dialed in. Charlie knew that would never happen, and quickly makes herself at home in her new school setting, not knowing the school's very existence is actively being threatened. I knew little about deafness and the deaf community prior to reading this book, and ate up all the details about various facets of the deaf experience deaf author Nović wove into the story. I especially loved the audiobook narrated by Lisa Flanagan and Kaleo Griffith, with the sound of signing over the speech when ASL was being used. (Though I'm already planning my reread in print, because of the visual ASL component included in that format.)