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About Strong Deaf
Product Description Jade is the only hearing member in her family. Her older sister gets to go to the school for the deaf headed by her grandfather Gilbert, but Jade feels left out. Marla thinks her little sister is a pest and a brat. When they end up on the same softball team for the summer, neither is happy about it. Jade, the smallest player on the team, is assigned to be the catcher. It looks like it’s going to be a long season. As sisters, they are often at loggerheads, but as team mates Jade and Marla have to find ways to get along. In spite of their differences, they soon discover that each has a lot to offer the other. From School Library Journal Gr 5-8-Twelve-year-old Jade is hearing; her fourteen-year-old sister, Marla, like much of their family, is deaf. Tensions mount between the sisters when they play on the same summer softball team. Set against the 2006 Gallaudet University student/alumni protests, the story gets a lot right: Jade's experience as a hearing child in a deaf family; Marla's defensive adolescent arrogance; the oppressive assumptions of hearing people the family encounters; the empowering values of Deaf Culture as depicted through successful Deaf adults with typical expectations of their children, whatever their hearing status. Unfortunately, the book's format may lead to misconceptions among readers not versed in American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf Culture; Jade's point of view appears in standard English, but Marla's point of view and signed communication are rendered in a stilted, present-tense-only patois that seems to be trying to approximate the order of ASL signing but only makes the characters sound illiterate and unintelligent. Jade incorrectly describes her signing style as "Exact Signed English" (the actual term is "Signing Exact English") and her family's ASL as "sort of a sign language shortcut." While it is believable for a child her age to misunderstand that ASL is a real language with its own grammar and linguistic structure separate from English, the fact that her misperception is never corrected for readers, not even in an author's note, is inexcusable.-Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MDα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
