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Updated June 10, 2015.
Written by a post-lingually deafened African-American woman, in Sounds Like Home, author Mary Herring Wright makes the deaf school experience of the 1930s come alive. Wright, who lost her hearing around age 10, misses being able to hear and repeatedly refers to songs, music and other sounds that she can no longer hear. Becoming fluent in sign language, she moves easily between the world of the deaf and the hearing world.
From Childhood to Teenager
The book starts off slowly, with Wright giving a detailed description of her early, hearing childhood in rural Iron Mine, North Carolina. The tempo of the book really picks up once she heads off to the school for the deaf. It's hard to suppress a chuckle when she writes of the rigidly enforced separation between the boys and girls at school and the teens' determination to have relationships with the opposite sex.
Link Between Worlds
As someone who was able to hear and talk, Wright often finds herself having to act as a go-between for the deaf nonspeaking students and hearing people. After first being homesick, she comes to view the residential school for the deaf as a second home. As one of the youngest students in her grade, Wright struggles for acceptance by the other students. Thanks in part to the English skills she had acquired before losing her hearing, she becomes an excellent student.
Enjoyable But No Classic
It is an enjoyable book, but by no means a classic.
Reading it, one gets the impression that except for the segregation, there wasn't really that much difference between the black and the white people. Wright does not emphasize discrimination issues and focuses on enjoying life instead. Certain inequities would have made a less positive person angry.
Final Recommendation
Sounds Like Home definitely belongs in the library of a deaf studies student and is a valuable addition to any deaf multicultural studies curriculum. Its true value lies in what it has to say, not in how it is said.
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