I woke up this morning thinking about this book. I’m not sure why.

Perhaps because I sympathize with the main character: even though Iris has been at this school for 2 years – since fourth grade – she still feels like the new girl. It’s hard for her to make friends because, unlike her old school, she is the only person at this school who is deaf. Some of the teachers don’t know how to – and don’t seem to want to know how to – communicate with her, and she has trouble making herself heard with them. Or with the other kids, who don’t know sign language and turn their faces away mid-sentence, so she can’t read what their lips are saying. Iris has been acting out, trying to make herself heard. But she doesn’t know how to communicate with the other kids; and they don’t know how to communicate with her. This gets Iris in a lot of trouble. She tries to get her mother to let her go to a school with a large population of students who are deaf and with classes taught in sign language; but her mother refuses.

Things are not so good outside of school either. Iris misses her grandfather who died recently. Sometimes she finds herself texting him out of habit. And then texts him anyway just to let him know that she’s thinking of him. Her parents have moved her grandmother to a senior living facility and she – also deaf – is not making friends either because she misses her husband, who she had been with since school. When Iris tries to sign with her, her grandmother turns every sign into a word for loneliness.

The one thing that Iris feels positive about is her hobby of fixing antique radios, radios so broken that nobody thinks they’re worth listening to. Iris is, in Strengthsfinder language, an Achiever. Each radio she fixes – her collection covers three walls of her room – is a reminder that she’s done something right. She also loves feeling the vibrations when she gets the radios working. From how the radios feel under her hand, she can tell if they’re playing music or talk radio or what.

In science class – the one class Iris loves, with a teacher who actually tries to sign – she learns about a Blue 55, a lonely whale who, separated from his pod, is roaming the oceans, singing in a different frequency and a different pattern than any other whale, a song even his own parents couldn’t understand. Iris says, “My stomach was in a ball. I wanted another whale […] to swim up to Blue 55, or at least look at him.” When the punishment for Iris’s latest trouble at school is “grounding” from her radio collection, Iris fills her time by going online to learn more about Blue 55.

And then Iris comes up with an idea to help Blue 55. It also helps her grandmother, who seems to have a spiritual connection to whales. And, in the end, it helps Iris, too.

This was a very hard book to post about because, as I flipped through it to pull out what I wanted to include, I kept starting to read it again. I’d get sucked in and then four pages later, catch myself, like Whoa, Nellie! You’ve got to finish your post and get ready for work! When I’m done writing about it, I’ll have to put it under my bed¹ to read next. This will not be a good book to read at bedtime though, because I will just keep reading it and reading it and not sleep. Better stick with the book I already started, on the history of El Nino – which, interesting as it is, puts me to sleep after only a few pages – and save this to read next weekend.

People in this book keep wanting Iris and her grandmother to change. Her mother wants Iris to mainstream, to figure out how to make friends with kids who can hear. The teacher who gives her the hardest time just wants her to be “normal.” The principal wants her to ask adults to intercede when she has conflicts with other kids, rather than standing up for herself. And Iris’s family wants her grandmother to stop being so sad, a lone whale without her mate.

That’s a lot of wanting. I like to say that you cannot manage change without changing the managers – in other words, when you want someone else to change, look in the mirror first. In this case, Iris helps the cetologists studying Blue 55 change how they interact with the whale. Iris’s mother needs to learn to change before she can get Iris to change. And the family needs to accept changes that the grandmother decides to make, in order to get grandmother’s mood to change.

When my nieces and nephews were little, I used to read to them; even when they were old enough to read to themselves, there was still something about reading together that kept us going. I wish this book had been around then; it’s a good book for parents and children to read together. To have a discussion about. My parents never asked me how things were at school and wouldn’t have known what to say if I had told them the truth instead of just mumbling, fine, like we all do. I wish we could have read a book like this together and maybe had a conversation about what was going on it.

---

1. Not “on my bedside table” because the dang cat will knock it off and tear it apart for daring to lie on a flat surface. All flat surfaces belong to the cat, says the cat. My pile of books is actually tucked between the mattress and the bedframe. ↩︎