True Biz

October 1, 2021

At the River Valley School for the Deaf, new transfer Charlie struggles to adjust, popular Austin faces the birth of a hearing sister, and the students generally just want parents, doctors, and politicians to stop telling them how to live their lives. Then there's headmistress February, who's worried that both the school and her marriage will get closed down. Novic, author of the Alex Award-winning Girl at War, is herself Deaf and writes frequently on the Deaf community.

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February 15, 2022
The author of America Is Immigrants (2019) and Girl at War (2015) goes deep into Deaf culture. True bizis an expression in American Sign Language that has a variety of English translations--"for sure," "seriously," "no joke," and "totally" among them. By using this phrase as her title, the author is underscoring the point that ASL is not just English rendered in hand gestures. It is, instead, a language with its own grammar, its own idioms, and its own stylistic flourishes. This presents Charlie Serrano with a challenge. The child of hearing parents, Charlie has a cochlear implant and has barely mastered the ASL alphabet when she transfers from her public high school to River Valley School for the Deaf. Headmistress February Waters--the hearing child of deaf parents--asks Austin Workman to help Charlie acclimate to her new environment. The fifth generation of his family to be deaf, Austin is something like aristocracy within his community. All of these characters are about to have a very tumultuous year. Novic is deaf, and her second novel might be regarded as part of the movement for stories about marginalized groups to be written by people who are themselves part of that group. Novic addresses a lot of topics here, from eugenics and racism to teen romance and middle-aged marital strife. The resulting narrative has an odd shape. The first half progresses at a very slow pace, and it's heavy on exposition. Things start moving in the second half, and there's a lot of action toward the end. The lessons in ASL and Deaf history interspersed throughout the text may keep the reader's interest more than the story alone would. A coming-of-age story that explores the complexities of community and the ways in which language defines us.

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Starred review from February 28, 2022
Nović (Girl at War) returns with an electrifying narrative set at a present-day boarding school for Deaf high school students, where they find love and friendship and battle a series of injustices. It’s centered around the River Valley School for the Deaf and follows three protagonists: headmistress February Waters, a hearing ally of the Deaf community; Austin, the school’s popular kid who belongs to a generational Deaf family; and Charlie, the newly admitted transfer student who struggles to fit in because of her inability to use ASL. Instead, her hearing parents forced her to have a cochlear implant. February, determined to make Charlie’s language immersion easier, assigns Austin to be Charlie’s guide. A romance develops between the two, but Charlie still struggles—her learning is disrupted by her mother’s refusal to sign and the frequent headaches caused by the implant. Meanwhile, February has a troubled marriage and must fight against bureaucratic forces that are trying to shut down the school. Circumstances worsen when, one morning, Charlie, Austin, and his roommate go missing from the school. With complex characters seething with rage against the injustices they face, and an immersive and novel treatment of Charlie’s experience learning ASL, Nović offers an unforgettable homage to resilience. This is brilliant. Agent: Alexandra Christie, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from February 1, 2022
Charlie is the only high schooler transferring to River Valley School for the Deaf. She'd been mainstreamed into school, her parents' hopes for "normal" language vanishing as Charlie's cochlear implant left her isolated and struggling with spoken language. When her parents' divorce opens the door for Charlie to start her sophomore year at the Ohio school fully equipped for Deaf students, it's a transforming experience. As she begins to learn ASL and keep up with her classmates, she comes to understand how many of her challenges stemmed not from any fault of hers but from others who were unwilling to accept her as she is. Charlie's journey is just one facet of this touching and witty celebration of Deaf culture, which also features golden boy Austin, whose family has been Deaf for generations, and headmistress February, the hearing daughter of Deaf parents, who now faces the closure of her beloved school. Along the way, Novic shares revealing glimpses of Deaf history and mythology, including the utopian land of Eyeth (as opposed to Earth), where everything is designed for easy visual access; the special qualities of Black ASL and the reasons why, for a time, primarily Black schools taught manual language; and how Martha's Vineyard developed into a real-world Eyeth. As pressure mounts for Charlie, Austin, and February, they must find their own way to share "true biz," or real talk, with those they care about most. Moving and revelatory.

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