Teen Tuesday: Give Me a Sign by Anna Sortino

Image: Penguin Random House

Give Me a Sign by Anna Sortino. 320 p. G.P. Putnam's Sons/ Penguin Young Readers, July, 2023. 9780593533796. Review of finished, purchased copy.

Happy Tuesday TMS Readers! We have been gifted with another gorgeous summer day. Please take advantage of it and get out in nature. Teen Tuesday features Give Me a Sign by Anna Sortino. This first-person narrative is told by seventeen-year-old Lilah. She has been partially deaf since birth. She wears hearing aids and her IEP calls for an FM system, but they aren't always used, so she relies on lipreading and her hearing aids to "pass," but it's sometimes frustrating and challenging. 

She wants to brush up on her ASL (American Sign Language) skills and applies to be a camp counselor at a summer camp for deaf and blind children. She has fond memories of the camp as she attended one summer when she was in the eighth grade. At camp, she meets a variety of campers and counselors with varying degrees of deafness and blindness. Oh, and one really cute boy.

In addition to being a cute, slow-burn romance, readers will learn about the deaf community - about the myriad degrees of deafness and their causes, as well as the challenges they face in a sometimes uncaring hearing world. Ms. Sortino is deaf and Give Me A Sign is her debut novel. Happy reading!