Ceri Louise Reads

Ebook received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

author: Sarah Marsh

publisher: Tinder Press

Release date: 1st February 2024

Synopsis: Ellen Lark became deaf after having scarlet fever as a child. Worried about her ability to survive in a hearing world, her mother and grandmother send her to a school where deaf children learn to speak, and later arrange for her to study Visible Speech with Alexander Graham Bell. While she is his student, he tells her of his ideas for inventions, devices that could help deaf people understand spoken language better, but also one that could transmit sound along a wire.

Meanwhile Ellen discovers a community of deaf people who use sign language to communicate – something forbidden by Ellen’s teachers. Ellen finds herself trapped between two worlds.

Several years later, on the verge of her marriage, Bell visits Ellen and her fiancé in London hoping for their support in promoting his new invention, the telephone. But a rival inventor also has a claim to the patent, and Ellen is caught in the middle again.

Content warnings: ableism, death – including death of a parent, toxic friendship, toxic relationship

Review: I really enjoyed this book! Ellen was a really likeable character and though I am hearing myself I live with a disability so I could appreciate her struggle to find her place in a world not designed for her.

I honestly hadn’t thought about how difficult it must have been for deaf people before the invention of hearing aids and implants, so I am grateful to this book for educating me, and also raising awareness of the stigma and isolation still felt by many deaf people. The details about children prevented from learning sign language or separated from their families were heartbreaking.

I enjoyed the dual timeline aspect of this book although at points I struggled to keep track of all the characters. The intrigue around the invention of the telephone and Bell’s work (albeit misguided) with the deaf were also new information for me, so this book was informative as well as entertaining. Altogether a great novel drawing many different threads and issues together.