My good friend, Phyllis, recommended this book to me. She knows my connections to sign language. It's one of the new books in our school library this year.

Here is a great moment in time captured by the granddaughter of two deaf grandparents. So, it's based on many real family stories of Delia. The story centers around Gussie who hates that her deaf parents aren't like everyone else in Birmingham. It all comes to a head one hot summer. It begins with her humming loudly during the worship service at the deaf church where her father is the minister - she and her two hearing sisters are the only ones that can hear her.

Her nasty and obstinate side continues through clandestine searches through the boarders rooms upstairs and continues to her skipping Sunday school at the hearing church downtown. All this naughtiness comes to a screeching halt when she is discovered. Her punishment is a very eye-opening experience which changes the way she sees her family and her life.

I worked with hearing impaired students for 2 years in Ohio and lived with a hearing impaired adult. Nancy taught me sign language and a whole lot more. I think she would really like this book.

Nancy grew up in the mid 70s when signing was still not really very accepted. She went through hearing schools and was proud of her lip reading abilities. That is until she went to Galludet College in Washington DC. It was there that she understood and embraced what it meant to be deaf. She completely changed her life. She became a teacher of deaf children - starting a preschool for deaf kids in Wooster, OH. That's where I came to know her. Today, Nancy is teaching deaf children in Belize.

This book made me think about what life was like for Nancy - growing up different. When I lived in Ohio, Nancy and I went out to eat one time and sat at the table signing back and forth to each other. I didn't really think about it until the waitress came to our table and didn't know what to do. She stood and stared and then bent over and very carefully and clearly asked us for our order. There was a moment when I had to decide what to do... I answered her, she blushed and moved away. In that moment - I understood what it really felt like to be different - to be deaf. ( )

Well, it was good in that there were a lot of deaf characters. More than two! It takes place in the 50's and we get a glimpse of how it was harder to be a deaf person if you were also black. Not that the main character is black, of course. She's a white hearing girl.And the main character is most of the problem with this book. She does some really uncaring, unthinking, wrong things and I have trouble understanding why she's doing them when she's doing them. She sneaks into a tenant's locked rock to rummage through and steal the woman's dead husband's clothes so she can pull a prank on her sister. And instead finds love letters from some other guy and takes one of those! And that's not the only wrong thing she does, but it's the one that rubbed me completely the wrong way. Skip Sunday school? Fine. Hum during church? I don't care. But violating someone's privacy like that? For no good reason?Almost wish the book had been about her father rather than her. He's a deaf minister who travels around all over the place to preach and minister in deaf churches all over the state and out of it. ( )

The summer of 1948 in Alabama was supposed to be fun, but this year her parents had decided to keep Gussie Davis home for most of the summer. A hearing girl with deaf parents loves to spontaneously try things, like humming during her father's deaf services, just to see if she'll get caught. Ray follows Gussie's misadventures and finally redemption at the deaf school. Covers issues of hearing versus deaf, early issues of deaf people having no one to sign with and considered strange Interesting story but the cover is a bit blah. I don't think kids would pick it up with that cover, would need to book talk. ( )

In the late 1940s, twelve-year-old Gussie, a minister's daughter, learns the definition of integrity while helping with a celebration at the Alabama School for the Deaf--her punishment for misdeeds against her deaf parents and their boarders.

Gussie rebels against her minister father. She and her sisters are hearing, while both their parents are deaf. It was all right, but I wouldn't read it again. ( )