IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC

When Adelaide musician Simon experiences sudden deafness, he struggles to find where, or if, he belongs in the hearing and Deaf worlds.

Narrated from 18-year-old Simon’s point of view, this novel explores the anger, frustration, grief, and fear of two teens dealing with unexpected hearing loss and follows them as they learn what it means to be d/Deaf. Simon awakens one morning to find that he can’t hear: A stroke has left him with an extremely rare case of cortical deafness. In Australian Sign Language class, he bonds with G, another teen dealing with her own recent deafness. Simon and G begin to build a relationship while trying to adjust to life without hearing and nursing a glimmer of hope for cures to their conditions. The author has taken a protagonist cut from the same cloth as many others—a moody teenage boy—and made him sympathetic and relatable. The search for identity is a universal theme, yet Simon’s story of confronting deafness and Deaf culture feels fresh. Though the story centers on Simon’s struggle to accept his deafness, it does not paint being deaf as a torture to be endured. It avoids both condescending pity and inspirational fluff, instead offering an unpretentious look at the process of losing and finding oneself after a life-changing event. Simon and G are white, and there is some ethnic diversity in secondary characters.

An honest, satisfying, and surprisingly original coming-of-age story.