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Alice Cogswell was a bright and curious child and a quick learner. She also couldn't hear. And, unfortunately, in the early nineteenth century in America, there was no way to teach deaf children. One day, though, an equally curious young man named Thomas Gallaudet, Alice's neighbor, senses Alice's intelligence and agrees to find a way to teach her. Gallaudet's interest in young Alice carries him across the ocean and back and eventually inspires him to create the nation's first school for the deaf, thus improving young Alice's life and the lives of generations of young, deaf students to come.
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A cute book about how Alice Cogswell inspired Gallaudet and Clerc to bring French sign language to America, told from Alice's perspective. Interesting that this book brings up Alice's fears that God has punished her by making her deaf - it kind of gets waved away by her dad saying that she's one of God's favourites.
I liked the depiction of the manual alphabet on the cover - I'm assuming it's what the French sign langage (LSF) manual alphabet looked like back in Alice's day, because it's slightly different from modern ASL and according to wikipedia, also slightly different from modern LSF.