NPR declared this book to be "eminently un-put-down-able," but that's garbage. I hate to write negatively of such a well-intentioned idea, but I read only four chapters of this before I put it down as eminently unreadable.
The first problem for me is that it's first person, which is a voice I detest. It's rarely a good way to tell a story, and for me it did not bring any immediacy or intimacy with the main character, Maya. Instead it made it even more clear what a bratty and belligerent person this 17-year-old was. It didn't bring me closer to her. Instead it drove me away from her. Had it been written in third person, it would have been less 'me-me-me' and might have made me more empathic toward her.
On the topic of voice, this is being pushed as an 'own voices' novel, although that's slightly misleading. The main character, Maya, is deaf, whereas the author is hard of hearing so it's not in the strictest sense an own voice although there are commonalities, of course. It seems like the author understands this and tries too hard to make the case for the deaf voice, as it were, and in doing so, she tends to caricature the character rather than make her a sympathetic one.
While I'm fully onboard with the own voices movement in the sense that everyone should have a voice, it bothers me that the implication of 'own voices' tends to be that no one but person 'X' can tell a story about community 'Y'. I think that's nonsense because it claims that this community, whatever it is: ethnic, nationality, disability-related, profession-related, LGBTQIA, religious, or whatever, is completely divorced from society and no one knows the least bit about it or has any interaction with it, or anything useful to say about it, which is bullshit.
Taken to its "logical" conclusion that means no one but a detective can write a crime novel, no one but a nurse or a doctor can write a medical novel, no one but a gay guy can have anything to say about a gay relationship, no one but a Chinese person can ever write a story with anything about China in it, and so on. I don't buy that. It's fiction! You can write it in any way you want. You can portray things any way you like. That doesn't mean you can't learn more from an own voices novel than you can from an outsider novel, but it also doesn't mean that no-one has anything to say about it, but the insiders. We need all perspectives. All Voices.
The biggest problem for me though, was that Maya makes no sense at all. She was not deaf from birth. She has been deaf only for three or four years because of an illness, so most of her life has been a hearing one, not hard-of-hearing or deaf. She is in a sense part of that community, but in another sense, she's not, depending on how you define it. This makes her behavior illogical at best and downright idiotic at worst, and her revulsion toward devices that can help her regain some hearing is not an intelligent or logical one. It's like she has some sort of psychological deficit - akin to people who feel their limbs are alien and want to cut them off, yet nowhere is any psychology 'own voice' brought to bear on this topic! That was a mistake.
The book description, as usual in books put out by Big Publishing™ seems like it was written by someone who has zero clue about the content of the book. It says, for example, "Deaf teen Maya moves across the country and must attend a hearing school for the first time. As if that wasn't hard enough, she also has to adjust to the hearing culture, which she finds frustrating." How can she find a culture frustrating when she was part of it just a couple of years before? A culture she has spent the bulk of her life being a part of? It's like she's forgotten her roots, or more disturbingly, is rejecting them. How can she be attending a hearing school for the first time when she grew up in hearing schools? It's a flagrant lie and the jerk who wrote that blurb is an asshole, period.
The book reads like being deaf is a cult for Maya - a fad or a thrill for her instead of what it is: a deficit as compared with what she had spent most of her life enjoying, whether she likes to think of it that way or not. We're naturally intended to hear. That's why we have the genetic mechanisms for hearing. Like I said: intelligent, consenting adults can make their own choices, but to pretend there's something wrong with being able to hear is nonsensical. Either way, it's not a one-size fits all deal. To claim otherwise is not helpful to anyone.
Also, in the quote above, what's that about Maya moving across the country? This alone made no sense since the rarified atmosphere of Colorado is not a great locale for Maya's kid brother who has cystic fibrosis. Like I said, I did not read very far into this novel because it severely turned me off, but let's suppose the family moved to Colorado for better treatment for her brother; isn't this hypocritical in a way? I mean Maya has chosen to embrace her condition, but the kid desperately needs treatment for his? I know that sounds cruel, but looked at dispassionately, isn't this what Maya is saying? She wants to become a respiratory therapist to help people like her brother, yet she rejects help for people like herself? Like I said, it made no sense and sends conflicting messages.
For someone who grew-up hearing and has had this loss of hearing experience not even for a handful of years, Maya is really bitchy, judgmental, and hyper-critical of everyone around her, and she behaves like she's a scared seven-year old rather than a supposedly maturing seventeen-year-old. This did not endear me to her and this hits the reader right from the start. She's whiny, clingy, and displays not an ounce of backbone, in complete contrast to what the idiotic book blurb claims, a blurb that seems to conflate blind obstinacy with integrity. This suggests that rather than having attend any sort of a realistic school, or even one of hard knocks, she's been positively coddled for the last two or three years. In itself, it doesn't speak highly of the school she left prior to attending this one. To me, it sounds insulting to that previous school.
So overall I was not impressed with the voice, own or not, in this novel and the writing was illogical and not appealing, which is why I didn't want to read on. I can't commend this based on what I did read of it. This is what I get for thinking a novel with a ridiculously pretentious "John Green" style title might be worth reading! It never is!
