The Sign for Home

Rounded up from 4.5 stars due to the evocative descriptions of Protactile and Haptics.

This was very sweet and dealt with, surprisingly, a lot of heavy topics. I appreciated the amount of research that the hearing author put into writing a book partially from the perspective of a deafblind person.

I'm not going to lie, I picked this up solely based on the assumptions I made looking at the cover. I thought it was going to be an adorable romance with a deafblind male lead. Yes, all of those things were present, but it was also so much more. There were moments that I cried, moments of intense anxiety, of mystery, and moments where I felt angry.
I loved the point of view shift from Arlo to Cyril. I loved the flashback scenes and being able to read with the asl sentence structure. I loved how vehemently CyriI advocated for Arlo, even to his own detriment. I felt like this book was so crammed full of experiences that the deafblind community goes through that it was almost too long. Almost, but not really. I'm torn because I really wanted and appreciated the variety of instances as there is such a lack of representation in any of the other books I read and media I consume.
I think the details about the day to day moments and the flashback moments were well thought out, but there were aspects of the story I didn't love. I think Brother Birch was a weak (if not completely quintessential) villain. Molly had a redemptive moment, but her reasoning pissed me off. I know people like Brother Birch and Molly exist, I just am sick of them being the bad guy archetype for every story. I also don't think the ending was thought out very well. It felt rushed and was obnoxiously convenient compared to the struggles Arlo went through just to get to New York. I'm glad he got to advocate for himself, but the fact that Shri's plan worked perfectly and they all ended up happy with almost no consequences was frustrating. I think this is a good book, but the ending and overarching conflict could have been given more time and attention.

This was so good and so much more emotionally charged than I expected from the ridiculous cartoon cover art and flippant blurb. I'm glad the author sprinkled in some humor here and there, because otherwise I would have been crying from start to finish. Thankfully, probably because of the author's own experience serving as an ASL translator for DeafBlind individuals, the story steers clear of disability porn (stories that reduce the person with a disability to an inspirational saintly object for the able-bodied ). Arlo gets help from his new-found friends, primarily his new interpreter Cyril, but he is very much the imperfect hero of his own story.

Read in less than 24 hours, and immediately wanted a sequel to find out what happened next to characters I had come to care deeply about. N.B.: the book alternates between Arlo's second person present and Cyril's first person past POV. It made total sense to me, but I know quirky POVs can be a turnoff to some readers.

Don't let the cutesy, cozy cover fool you! One masterful tale of triumph over adversity that simultaneously teaches and amuses the mind. Like Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, this book radically changed my perception of a people group. Fell brilliantly explores the fine line between assistance and infantilism.

Fell's characters are so vivid! My mind absorbed this book almost like a true story. I am left with a precious hope for Arlo - as if he is really here in our world.

Explicit warning: a few sex scenes and several F bombs.