Singing Hands

July 1, 2006
Gr 5-8 -Twelve-year-old Gussie Davis, the hearing daughter of deaf parents in 1948 Birmingham, AL, is feeling rebellious. She sings out loud during the mass at St. Jude -s Church for the Deaf, where her father is the minister; when her parents send her to the hearing church, she skips out of Sunday school and uses her collection money to buy sodas; and she steals an old love letter from Miss Grace, one of her parents - boarders. Because of her actions, her father won -t let her take a much-loved trip to her aunt in Texas and instead involves her in his missionary efforts at a black deaf church and with supporting the use of sign language at the Alabama School for the Deaf. Gussie gradually comes to terms with her parents - deafness and her place in the world. An excess of subplots -including her foray into popularity, her relationship with an eccentric boarder, the lost-love tale of a deaf boarder, and befriending a -colored - deaf boy -renders the story a bit difficult to follow, but the exploration of Gussie -s feelings toward her parents and the hearing world, which she is part of and simultaneously at odds with, is heartfelt." -Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD"

Copyright 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2006
Gr. 4-7. Under typical circumstances, Gussie wouldn't get away with humming loudly in church, but as the daughter of deaf parents (her father is the minister of the deaf congregation), she assumes only her sisters know her misdeed. She is wrong, of course, and a hearing visitor outs her to her parents. Even so, Gussie continues to misbehave in this quietly humorous story, inspired by tales about Ray's mother's childhood with deaf parents. The setting is Birmingham, Alabama, in the summer of 1948, and the hardships and prejudices faced by the hearing impaired are displayed against a backdrop of a pre-civil rights South. The prose doesn't always sing, but Gussie's awakening to the world around her, the chorus of characters, and the family dynamics will keep readers interested. A chart of the manual alphabet will help kids decode the symbols used to finger-spell the chapter titles in the book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)