This book is frustrating. But the content itself--the Deaf community itself--is frustrating as well.

Before anyone yells at me, I am deaf with a cochlear implant. Have been since I was a wee baby. I know some ASL but am not fluent in it considering there's barely any Deaf community in my area.

But we're talking about the book, here...

The Story
The premise works well, it's about a Deaf girl who reconnects with her community at a summer camp.

The Protagonist
Good lord, this girl is as dumb as rocks. She makes one terrible decision after another, half the time out of pure laziness or just general airheadedness. Without spoilers, she is a godawful camp counselor and should not have been kept on after the 3rd mistake.

With spoilers, if you're curious...Lilah is a dingbat.

-Lilah lets a girl with a cochlear implant go canoeing. She does at least ask if it's waterproof and the girl responds yes. It was still a monumentally STUPID decision to let a 10-year-old go canoeing with MEDICAL equipment that can easily be lost. I also didn't appreciate how the author made it seem like it was the cochlear implant processor's fault for not staying on. It's...canoeing. It's not an activity that you should bring stuff like a CI processor, earrings, glasses, etc, with you.

-Lilah forgot to bring an alarm clock with her to a summer camp. For those who don't know, the Deaf really need a specialized alarm clock to wake up so not just any alarm clock will work. Lilah made her coworkers wake her up all summer, pretty self-centered there.

-Lilah forgot to bring enough batteries for her hearing aid all summer.

-Lilah brought ONE (ONE???) swimsuit with her to a summer camp. Girl. Please.

-After a tornado ripped through the camp as she and the other campers are hiding in the basement, Lilah decided it would be a great idea to sneak out with her boyfriend and ditch her coworker in the middle of the night. Genius!

-Lilah was also involved in a drunken outing with her equally underaged coworkers.

There's a long list of reasons why Lilah should never have been a camp counselor in the first place...I know teenagers are considered irresponsible and immature but it was really weird to see her get rewarded after every mistake.

She finally got "in trouble" for one of her stupid mistakes but it was just a slap on the wrist.

I really just don't think teenagers are that immature and it felt like the author was trying to make her more relatable by making her make human mistakes but when she's supposed to be protecting and helping the Deaf and blind kids at camp it comes across as very self-centered and impossibly immature. Why would anyone let Lilah be in charge of the children at this point? Ha.

The Romance
Pretty threadbare. It really doesn't help that the author doesn't develop any of the side characters so they all just seem like interchangeable background characters.

Conclusion

I'm sorry for being harsh on this book and I do appreciate the actual Deaf representation by an author for Deaf readers but rating it as a book alone--it's not good.

There's a lot of telling and not showing and I think the book was very focused on the Deaf community which is fine but if you wanted a romance, it took a backdoor for all the explanations of the Deaf community.

This book is basically preaching how awesome being Deaf is and how great ASL is. Which is fine but it's not much of a romance book with all the Deaf info shoved into it.

Going back to the Deaf community stuff--this book definitely shows bias against cochlear implant users like myself.

Toward the end:
Lilah's parents want their youngest son to get a cochlear implant because his hearing is getting worse and Lilah convinces her brother to not be persuaded by their parents and decide if he wants it or not. I mean, sure, ignore the audiologist and the studies were done that the earliest you get a CI indicates even better hearing (example: me)...I will concede at least the author said that kids feel pressured by parents to make decisions they don't want to do. So it was a bit of both arguments but CIs were never popular in this particular book so I'm sure the author prefers anything not involving hearing aids or cochlear implants...

I don't know, the book still has the Deaf bias and arguments against cochlear implants/hearing aids that I'm tired of reading in every book. Maybe I should write my own at this point, ha.

To preface, I have been profoundly deaf since I was a baby. I got my cochlear implant at age 2. Just to get that out of the way before some d/Deaf folk come in here complaining about a "hearing" person rating a Deaf author's book low. I'm also a white girl, which will make sense later.

Okay, let's move on.

I will say Kolb did a great job of explaining the speech therapy sessions, breaking down how they worked and how it was just part of her life. She did a great job in explaining numerous aspects of a d/Deaf person's life, from lip-reading to being excluded from events.

My biggest issue is that a lot of these explanations were sporadically thrown in at random parts of the book instead of slowly given at the beginning to help paint a bigger picture of what d/Deaf people deal with. Lip-reading explanations were given around 80% of the book, which is crazy to me considering that's the biggest skill the d/Deaf cultivate early on.

So...I had a lot of issues with this book and how it was presented.

Kolb didn't really explain her family situation all that well. We had to fill in the gaps--the fact that her mom could afford to quit her job and be a stay at home mom and help her daughter out at school for field trips and etc...Kolb also owned a horse, which is not a typical "toy" to own, lol. From the little bit of information gleaned, I feel like I can confidently say Kolb came from a place of wealth and privilege. She was going to all the fanciest colleges in the world--Stanford, which had an "excellent" equestrian program that she noted in the book--as well as Oxford. Sure, she could've gotten some scholarships, that's fair, considering a deaf white woman would be appealing to a college's diversity checkmark list. (Speaking from experience here, also as a deaf white woman!)

Why does the privilege matter? I felt it jumping out at the pages in certain sections:

- She mentioned Harry Potter at least 10 times in this book. That seems unimportant, but considering the author's extremely negative views of the LGBTQ+ community, it felt strange to keep bringing it up throughout the book. She mentions at least 3 other random books, such as Redwall, but HP kept being brought up. It was a great series for me to read as a kid, but since JKR's BS I've just completely disavowed them. She never brings them up as part of her understanding of disability because there were NO disabled characters in these books. Even if there were, they would've been named something awful like Cho Chang. To me, bringing up a book series that is not disability-friendly, nor explaining how the series helped her find herself, just feels like privilege. She is clearly not LGBTQ+ or friends with any because it would be rather rude to bring them up.

- Horses. Again, she glossed over her childhood but she did keep bringing up going out riding on horses and going to horse events. This is not a typical hobby because I've seen the stuff the "horse girl" stereotype pay for. It's a VERY expensive hobby that's out of range for most people. Again, I wouldn't have minded it if it was a cumulative part of her childhood but she just mentions it sporadically.

- COMPARING DEAF SCHOOLS TO THE INDIGENOUS GENOCIDE? BRO? This really pissed me off. Deaf schools trying to teach kids to speak English is not erasing a culture. The Indigenous Peoples' kids were literally ripped away from their parents, shipped to god knows where, and forced to completely forget their LANGUAGE and CULTURE. d/Deaf people still signed ASL just outside of school. They were still part of their culture and surrounded by d/Deaf people. These indigenous kids were trapped in another world and forced to assimilate. That's incredibly tone deaf (ha) to state in a book. If anyone's like "nah, she didn't say that!" here's the excerpt:

"The old oralists, not unlike the white instructors who established Native American boarding schools during the same period in America, embraced "standard" English as their primary route toward cultural assimilation. In doing so, these oralists tended to draw sharp lines through the ways human beings interact and express themselves. Speech or sign. Assimilation or isolation."

Privileged much?

Oh, if that's not enough, she also got pissed off at Huck Finn's mocking of deafness. A book from 1884. One particular line pissed her off in 10th grade: "How are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?" The two characters go "goo-goo" and pretend they're deaf.

This shocked her so much, apparently. The portrayal of deafness...the book is literally satire, nothing in this book is serious. Not to mention it's 141 years old. She goes on to say:

"Then my hand darted into the air. 'I don't think we should be talking about deaf people this way,' I said, in my own deaf speech. I felt the entire class stop and look at me, not unkindly, then shift their gazes to the corner of the room.

Our class had already discussed the novel's racial politics. We'd examined the stark illustrations from the book's first published edition in which Jim, a fully grown Black man, kneels and begs for his life before the white rascal boy Huck, who tilts back on his heels with a rifle in his hands. How much this image had to say about America. Now with the duke's goo-goo-gooing, I saw the stakes of representation expand even further."

It's not like the book was meant to be perfect--it's perfectly imperfect in every which way. I would say oh, this is just a typical 10th grader getting pissed off at something they don't understand (I've done the same), but she STILL keeps bringing up throughout the rest of the book how this changed her. Again, it's ironic for her to hate this book but be totally fine with HP not having a single disabled character. Oh wait, I do remember now. Neville's parents were trapped in a mental asylum because of some awful magic done to them. The mental asylum was a typical 1950s horror asylum and soooo poorly done. Sorry JKR I forgot you did include disability in the worst possible way! :D (sarcastic)

Okay another thing--she claims "There's an adage that you can tell a deaf person by their eyes." I have literally never heard of this in my entire life, pun intended. Do I have DEAF eyes? Do my DEAF eyes just hone in on the nearest DEAF person in the room? Wtf was this made up "adage"!!!

I'm frankly not sure why she even got the cochlear implant in the first place, considering she got it, was amazed by sounds, and then decided to just never speak again anyway. She insists on having ASL interpreters everywhere despite being able to hear. I just don't quite understand the rationale and it feels like she explains it by saying it's just a Deaf thing. I personally know a little sign and rely more on hearing and I find ASL interpreters too slow to keep up with dialogue. Anyway, I didn't really like her line of thinking about the cochlear implant being an invasive creature set to destroy her life. She really needs to see a therapist for that. It's a tool to restore some shred of hearing and I love it so much--it made me discover amazing music all around the world!

I also didn't like how she painted herself as a victim during one flashback. During her Deaf camp escapades, some Deaf kids were bullying the HELL out of this cochlear implant kid and were trying to rip it off and she just sat there and watched and I was so pissed off! I think Kolb is a very passive person who doesn't like to cause "trouble" which I get, but that was extreme. I had to deal with Deaf kids bullying as a kid and I didn't take shit from them.

Often times Kolb laments outings with friends where she feels left out. So don't go out with friends who can't be bothered to make basic accommodations work for their FRIEND. I straight up say, "No, I can't go there, it's not accessible," and a friend and I just figure something else out. It feels like Kolb was being mopey but also did not want to be a downer, but you are DISABLED. You cannot be expected to "have fun" at restaurants where the party is too large! I guess she didn't want to be labeled as a "bitch" or something, but it just felt like she created some of these problems on her own. At least later on in life she is more proactive about making sure reasonable accommodations are made for her, so I think she did learn eventually, but her mopey college life was pissing me off.

Yeah, so, I wasn't a fan of this book. Her privilege just bleeds through and kind of ruins it for me. Her voice in this book is extremely condescending and superior and it feels like any nice parts that were added were added because of the editor's suggestions.

I'm sorry to rate this so long, but there's just a myriad of problems with the presentation and info in this memoir that I can't really recommend it.