Spiritomb

I didn't finish this book. The main premise of the main character being uniquely able to avoid rockfalls due to being hearing is evidence that the author did not talk to any d/Deaf people at all. Deaf people can feel the vibrations that would warn them of rockfalls, and they can feel vibrations of sounds (especially loud sounds) in their bodies. The scene where a gong is struck makes it really obvious that the author didn't ask any actual deaf person what their sensory experiences are around percussion. Deaf schools have percussion bands! I also thought it was bizarre that in a village where everyone has been deaf for hundreds of years, the villagers would think of themselves as lacking?

In addition, the concept of balance was not well-developed, and the main character's criticism of the supplier's interpretation didn't feel like it was coming from within the same culture. I also didn't feel like the supplier's argument for why it's fair for the village to be given fewer resources because balance really made sense in a context of how balance is understood in Taoism. It felt like a caricature of Taoism.

I feel bad giving this only two stars because the premise of a remote village where everyone has been deaf for hundreds of years is so cool! But this book was so disappointing.

I related very strongly to Caitlin as an autistic person. I was very much like her when I was 11. What keeps me from rating this book 5 stars, however, is Erskine's presentation of autism as a behavioral spectrum from “high” to “low” functioning, and her broad endorsement of early intervention. Autism is not a linear spectrum, nor is it a behavioral spectrum: it is a spectrum in that every autistic person has different skill sets that often vary and fluctuate throughout the autistic person's lifetime. Erskine's broad endorsement of early intervention is irresponsible and reflects a lack of research into what autistic adults have been saying about the extremely negative effects ABA and other behavioristic therapies (any therapy with “make the autistic kid act neurotypical” as a goal) had on their self esteem and general well being (often in the form of developing PTSD). The goals of early intervention should be to help the autistic person learn more about herself & the world and to develop self-advocacy skills, not to make her act like a neurotypical person. An endorsement of early intervention that does not take this information into account is irresponsible and dangerous.

There are some aspects of this book that made me very uncomfortable. There are several instances of uncritically presenting dialogue that includes the word “Injun.” Calpurnia's grandfather was a captain in the Confederate army, so while there's no real overt pro-Confederate content, the Confederate romanticism that would have been in full swing in 1899 is just never talked about directly. The kids play Civil War and obviously valorize the Confederates, because no one wants to be the “Federals,” who are the bad guys. Stonewall Jackson is regarded as a war hero by Calpurnia and her brothers, at one point. The lack of clear authorial commentary on the Confederate romanticism of the era is the elephant in the room.

While this is most likely an accurate depiction of Confederate romanticism in Texas in 1899, it is irresponsible to present white kids in 1899 valorizing the Confederacy as if it's something neutral in 2016. Occasionally the narration sounds like an adult Calpurnia recounting her childhood–which is an excellent way to inject authorial commentary even mildly critical of the Confederate romanticism that obviously surrounded Calpurnia. I'm not asking for Calpurnia to have a modern understanding of racial justice–just like, some statement about how she and her siblings had no idea what the war was really about when they were young? (Also, I can't remember if it's said whether the grandfather obtained the plantation house before or after the war so idk if he was a slaveholder himself. But he absolutely would have known what the war was about and not denied it, if the author were committed to portraying former Confederate officers accurately.)

Anyway. Those are my thoughts. I wouldn't give this book to a kid unless I deliberately intended to be discussing it one chapter at a time, deliberately drawing attention to the Confederate romanticism that a white kid in Texas in 1899 would have been surrounded by, as part of a larger conversation about people today who are grappling with having Confederate soldiers among their ancestors.

Sometimes the narration is hard to follow. It's not always sequential and the POV shifts: some chapters are first-person from Snow White's perspective, and some are third-person-specific (to another character). The third-person chapters are showing events that happen while she's not present or not awake, as well as events happening to her from the other character's perspective.

There is depiction of sexual harassment, sexual assault and child abuse. The sexual assault is not graphic; it's a fade-to-black and in a detached third-person POV.

This book is an exploration of how quickly a conflict can spiral out of control when the parties involved do any kind of fudging the truth to present themselves in a more favorable light. In Phillip's case, he lied that he was humming the national anthem in order to be patriotic when he was really just trying to annoy a teacher who wasn't tolerant of his clowning around. In the case of his teacher, she exaggerated the volume at which he was humming. We see how misunderstandings rapidly balloon as school administrators fail to effectively communicate with each other and people outside the school—a prospective school board candidate, newspapers, and a conservative-leaning talk show akin to the O'Reilly Factor—get involved.

I really enjoyed the description of the school administration internals and how from the beginning, the poor communication between administrators set the stage for what turned into a national incident. It's very clear that neither Phillip nor the teacher Ms Narwin were given an opportunity by others to sort out the conflict before it was too late. And although Phillip becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the positive attention from strangers who believe he's a valiant patriot whose freedoms are being threatened, it's beyond his control by the time he realizes he shouldn't have lied. Likewise, Ms. Narwin has been harmed by those same strangers and by the time Phillip tries to talk to her, she is so unwilling to consider the possibility that Phillip doesn't condone the threats to her career that she deliberately closes herself off from him out of self preservation.

I really appreciate the ultimate message that everyone's somewhat in the wrong: Ms. Narwin for exaggerating the disruptiveness of Phillip's humming, Phillip for lying that he was being patriotic instead of trying to annoy her, the neighbor Ted for further embellishing Phillip's lie, Ms Narwin's superiors for not listening to her ideas for how to resolve the situation without making Phillip more bitter. By the time the first newspaper story is printed, it's already too late to go back. Any possibility of respectful discourse gets nullified as more and more people make assumptions about what happened.

I felt like this is the kind of thing that could have happened in my high school, though I was in high school more than a decade later. The story has a timeless quality where it will continue to be relevant with only very minor updates to the references to technology.