Gr 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, MD Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

In 1948 Alabama, twelve-year-old Gussie, as punishment for bad behavior, must help her deaf minister father, an experience that introduces her to the prejudice operating in both the deaf and hearing worlds. While the portrayal of a signing household is natural and convincing, the focus is on Gussie's rebellion and growth, the real heart of the story.

Under typical circumstances, Gussie wouldn't get away with humming loudly in church, but as the daughter of deaf parents (her father is the minister of the deaf congregation), she assumes only her sisters know her misdeed. She is wrong, of course, and a hearing visitor outs her to her parents. Even so, Gussie continues to misbehave in this quietly humorous story, inspired by tales about Ray's mother's childhood with deaf parents. The setting is Birmingham, Alabama, in the summer of 1948, and the hardships and prejudices faced by the hearing impaired are displayed against a backdrop of a pre civil rights South. The prose doesn't always sing, but Gussie's awakening to the world around her, the chorus of characters, and the family dynamics will keep readers interested. A chart of the manual alphabet will help kids decode the symbols used to finger-spell the chapter titles in the book.

It is 1948 in Birmingham, Ala., and lively Gussie, age 12, explains that her comeuppance for humming during her deaf-minister father's church services is the start of what turns out to be one of the worst and best times of her life. Her kind parents interpret this funny first misdemeanor to be a sign that she needs more from the hearing world. Not so, but as she maneuvers in the new, unfamiliar semi-snotty church, her confidence diminishes and she can't stop acting like a clod. Tension builds as her risks at the new church and her high jinks at home come closer to discovery, until her punishment becomes a summer job at the school for the deaf. Ray's powerful control here creates realistically sympathetic characters, whose anxieties and disappointments are palpable. Once in the deaf school, their world, the teaching philosophy of the time includes segregation of black students. Here, Gussie uses all of her talents, her kindness, humor and playfulness; she learns about others and thinks of them first. Two provisos to Ray's superb work: Deaf-culture advocates may object to a finale of deaf students signing songs for the amusement of hearing people, and some readers will be annoyed that every loose end is tied up in the happiest of ways. Inspired by Ray's mother's own experience. (Fiction. 10-14)