Singing Hands
Grade 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, MDCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.