LitPick Review
When Meg Appens, her mother, and younger brother moved from Eastern Washington to the Seattle area, they never realized just how different each of their lives would be. Moving is always a transitional thing for anyone, no matter what your age, but this move seemed especially hard for Meg because she is deaf. She was used to the deaf school she attended in Washington, so going to an “all hearing” school for students set poor Meg back from day one. She not only will have to make all new friends, but she is the only deaf person in her high school. To make matters worse, the translator the school hires for her is horrible in her translation, which makes Meg fall behind right from the start.
After going through some massive bumps in the road, Meg is finally paired with a new translator named Connie. They hit it off extremely well, and Meg tries earnestly to pick up her falling grades. Along the way, she meets Kelsey, a fellow tenant and who also is the superintendent’s daughter. Meg thinks that maybe they could be friends since they live in the same building, but their friendship even hits road bumps right from the start. Does Meg finally find her footing in this “all hearing” school? Is she able to pick her grades up enough to start playing basketball?
Opinion:
This book had a lot of emotions packed into the storyline right from the start. I loved seeing the story unfold from Meg’s eyes and deaf ears. Readers will cheer her on because they experience everything she does as if they too were deaf. To see how the other students treated her because she was deaf was saddening. I found myself wanted to step in to protect her as if she was a real person I knew. I was so happy when they finally paired her up to Connie, who cared for Meg and wanted to see her succeed in high school.
There were two characters that I had mixed emotions about right as soon as they were introduced into the storyline. Kelsey seemed like a stuck-up girl who wanted to be part of the in crowd, so she snubbed Meg whenever she could at school, but then acted like nothing happened when they saw each other in their apartment building. To me, she didn’t need Kelsey because her true colors were apparent right from the start. The other character was Eli, a fellow classmate and soon to be love interest. He appeared genuine and it seemed he truly had feelings for Meg, but as the story unfolded, he too seemed stuck-up and only did things to cause reactions from others. I hated him toward the end when he just disappeared out of Meg’s life for over a week, and when I found out the real reason, I wanted her to dump him immediately because she deserved so much better.
I must commend Paddy Eger on her detailed telling of this story through a deaf person’s eyes. You don’t see many books on the market portraying a main character as being deaf, so when a special story like this comes along, readers will stop to take in the different perspective and interpretation of a deaf person. She created Meg to be a real person as well, and I cheered her on when something worked out for her, and I wanted to cheer her up when something went horribly wrong in her life.
Overall, Sticks and Stones is a teenage story that can be enjoyed by older readers as well. It presents a true perspective of what deaf people go through on a daily basis and allows readers to see and hear things differently even though they aren’t deaf. I feel this is the perfect book to have young people read to help them develop proper social etiquette when they meet someone who has a disability such as deafness.
