Deafening

Rating:
Summary: Amazingly written but... confusing
Review: Deafening is one of the best books I've read in a while, but sometimes it falls into ambiguosity. The changing verb tenses and constant reminders that the main character is deaf are wonderfully placed to put you in Grania's mindset, but I wouldn't recommend this book to someone who has never read a book from this genre before.

Rating:
Summary: Language of Love
Review: This is a wonderful first novel about sound, silence, deafness, communication and love. Grania is a young girl who loses her hearing at the age of five. Her guilt-ridden mother refuses to accept that she is deaf and resists adapting to reality; only Grania's loving grandmother saves her from a life of illiteracy and loneliness. Grania is taught to read with "The Sunday Book," a precious gift from her grandmother that becomes a metaphor for life's struggles and complications as Grania emerges from childhood, attends school, and meets "Chim," a hearing man who loves her stillness. Just married, Grania must return home to wait while Jim goes to war as a stretcher bearer.

Once again, WWI emerges as incredibly pointless and bloody, as men are thrown into the confusion of the European front. Jim experiences the war as a haze of brutal sound. He steels himself to the sight of mutilated men blown apart, but cannot stand the sight of their hands, which of course for him had become the instruments of his personal "language of love" with Grania. Meanwhile at home, a beloved friend from Grania's childhood who became her sister's husband returns home, mute from a horror no one can imagine. Drawing on the foundation of love from her grandmother, the deaf Grania not only coaches him back to speech but heals her sister as well. The end of the novel feels tantalizingly like only the beginning for these wonderful multi-dimensional characters.

Itani is a wonderful writer, and manages to convey to those of us who hear what it's like not to be able to--she also shows what we the hearing might be missing! The background on the theories of language and teaching the deaf was fascinating, and Itani must have done some meticulous research. This is a wonderful novel well worth your time.

Rating:
Summary: Simply Delightful
Review: This novel gives a wonderful, insider's view of deafness and war. Once Jim goes off to WWI, some of the chapters are told from his perspective. At first, I was disappointed by this shift, but as the war (and ultimately, the novel) drags on, I wanted to know what was happening to Jim and the boys he was working with.

Itani writes wonderful, three-dimensional portraits of Grania's family, especially Mamo and Tress, Kenan, Fry, the various characters in Deserando, Jim (Grania pronounces his name as Chim), Irish (the name is ironic, considering that Grania is Irish) and even the teachers at Grania's deaf school. Though the novel drag on at moments, you will want to read it until the end.