Deafening

Grania O’Neill #1

by Frances Itani

At the age of five, Grania-the daughter of hardworking Irish hoteliers in smalltown Ontario-emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf and is suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. Her guilt-plagued mother cannot accept her daughter's deafness. Grania's saving grace is her grandmother Mamo, who tries to teach Grania to read and speak again. Grania's older sister, Tress, is a beloved ally as well-obliging when Grania begs her to shout words into her ear canals and forging a rope to keep the sisters connected from their separate beds at night when Grania fears the terrible vulnerability that darkness brings. When it becomes clear that she can no longer thrive in the world of the hearing, her family sends her to live at the Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville, where, protected from the often-unforgiving hearing world outside, she learns sign language and speech.

After graduation Grania stays on to work at the school, and it is there that she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man. In wonderment the two begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But just two weeks after their wedding, Jim must leave home to serve as a stretcher bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders.

During this long war of attrition, Jim and Grania's letters back and forth-both real and imagined-attempt to sustain their young love in a world as brutal as it is beautiful. Frances Itani's depiction of a world where sound exists only in the margins is a singular feat in literary fiction, a place difficult to leave and even harder to forget.

A magnificent tale of love and war, Deafening is finally an ode to language-how it can console, imprison, and liberate, and how it alone can bridge vast chasms of geography and experience.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Canada, Book Club, Historical, War, Disability

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Frances Susan Itani is a Canadian fiction writer, poet and essayist.

Itani was born in Belleville, Ontario and grew up in Quebec. She studied nursing in Montreal and North Carolina, a profession which she taught and practised for eight years. However, after enrolling in a writing class taught by W. O. Mitchell, she decided to change careers.

Itani has published ten books, ranging from fiction and poetry to a children's book. Her 2003 novel Deafening, published in 16 countries, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region) and the Drummer General’s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her short story collection, Poached Egg on Toast, won the Ottawa Book Award and the CAA Jubilee Award for Best Collection of Stories. She was recently awarded the Order of Canada. Frances Itani lives in Ottawa.

Reviews

[☕Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Grania and Jim have taken their place in my heart as one of my favorite literary couples. Although this book addresses many larger issues - disability, illness, war - and does it well, at its heart it is Jim and Grania's love story, the story of a love that sustains and survives. This book is beautifully written and truly touched my heart. I cannot wait to read the sequel, Tell.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's not a single false gesture in Frances Itani's "Deafening." Despite its subjects - war, romance, disability - it's a story of careful, measured emotion, bleached of all sentimentality. The publisher has positioned the novel as a debut in America, but Canadians have been reading Itani for decades, and every page of this story betrays the hands of a mature writer who knows exactly what she's doing.

The heroine, Grania O'Neill, was robbed of her hearing at the age of five by scarlet fever in the early 20th century. Itani narrates her life in a voice imbued with the cadences of the deaf girl's thoughts and sensibilities, a technique that submerges us in Grania's silent but vivid world, a place "divided into things that move and things that don't move."

Her parents are too burdened by guilt and too mired in hopes for a miracle to work with their daughter's obvious intelligence, but her grandmother remains determined to teach Grania to read. The process, so tactilely described here, involves studying simple pictures and words, feeling her grandmother's throat, and attending to the slight fluttering of others' lips. Everywhere, there are traps and tricks, puns and homonyms, silent k's and g's, nonsensical idioms, and worst of all, mustaches that camouflage the shape of speakers' words.

But "nothing will stop Grania," Itani writes. "When she is alone she stands on tiptoe on the stoop at the back, behind the laundry, and she watches her reflected mouth in the narrow window. Hetakesabite. She studies each word separately. She holds her voice as close to herself as she can. It is like pressing a pillow against her chest, the way the boy in the picture presses the book to his sailor suit."

Showing Grania pull herself into the world of language so deliberately and with such extraordinary concentration, Itani reinvests words with an arresting power most of us have forgotten. But she wields that power with quiet, remarkable effect.

After a brief stint in a regular public classroom being alternately ignored or pitied, Grania is sent away to a progressive school for the deaf, where she cries for two weeks and then resolves never to cry again. The training - in speech and sign language - is arduous, but Grania's grandmother provided a good foundation. "Her hands, to her surprise, and jerkily at first, begin to send ideas out," Itani writes. "Her face and body punctuate; her eyes receive. She is falling into, she is entering a new world. She is joining the larger conversation of hands."

Soon after she graduates, Grania meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man. I can't remember ever feeling so greedy for more details from a novel. Grania and Jim develop an intimacy intensified by their struggle to communicate with one other, and Itani's discipline as a narrator makes their courtship all the more striking.

"She wanted to talk. The room was dark unless there was a moon, but she did not need the moon. She closed her eyes and raised the fingers of her left hand to his lips. Though at first he was astonished, he understood and began to speak. His careful words fell into her fingertips and she whispered back and they conversed like this, side by side."

Married only two weeks, Jim is sent to France as a stretcher-bearer, and the novel splits into two very different stories: One remains with Grania in Canada, and the other follows Jim into the trenches of Europe. Their experiences couldn't be more different, of course. Itani constructs a striking juxtaposition between Grania's small, silent world and the cacophony of battle that her husband endures.

But the author also hears the resonance between these two experiences: Jim's survival often depends on his ability to exercise the same attention as Grania to slight movements around him, and in the roar of shells and gunfire, his men resort to impromptu sign language. Back home, Grania battles the influenza epidemic that will eventually kill more people than the First World War.

What's particularly remarkable about this novel is that Itani's quiet, measured style, which seems so effective for describing the simple details of domestic life, becomes downright stunning when employed in her descriptions of war. From Jim's initial burst of patriotic enthusiasm, through stages of blinding terror and nausea, he trudges on for years in a world "no one would believe." These anecdotes of unrelenting chaos, gore, and waste serve as a sobering reminder of the nature of battle before technology allowed us to pretend that the process of killing other people could be precise and antiseptic.

Grania, consumed like so many women at this time with the tasks of waiting, clings to a few letters that manage to make it back to her, hoping guiltily that Jim, unlike so many others, will survive. Meanwhile, "Deafening" demonstrates a perfect ear for the tragic mingling of joy and grief at the arrival of a wounded loved one. Grania's brother-in-law, hideously disabled and shocked into silence, provides a frightening example of the alternatives to death in Europe.

One of the novel's most beautiful sections involves her efforts to help this young man emerge from the fog of his pain. There are no miracles - for Grania or her brother-in-law - but the qualities she developed as a child, her fierce attention to language and the world around her, are not easily thwarted. It's a gorgeous irony and a testament to the power of affection when the one person in his life who can't hear finally makes him speak.

"Sorrow can be borne," Grania's grandmother insists, and there's enough in this poignant story to reassure us of that promise and point to something beyond endurance. Indeed, there are passages here so beautiful that we can't help straining to hear more.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0821/p1...

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this novel for our "Canada Reads" themed book club.
I enjoyed the historical information concerning WWI, however in order to be a realistic account of events, the story was quite graphic when describing the horrendous details of life during war.
I appreciated the author's extensive research into WWI as well as into the challenges of being deaf.
A slow read and I was hoping for something profound.

[Carolyn Gerk · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not certain that this wasn't a good book, but at the very least, I, personally, was not in the right state of mind to read it. I felt like it had so much potential: an original story, an exciting setting, some very clever and poignant symbolism and resounding themes.
Sadly, I was just never really hooked. I never felt engaged in this novel. I am not sure if that is due in part to an inability to connect to the characters. I had some interest in Jim and occasionally in our heroine, though I often found her stories to be tedious and dull. I have found, when reading novels that are set during war times in which some sections are told from 'at home' and 'over there' the stories of the characters who are away in battle are the most engrossing, leaving the tales of those who have been left behind to feel often a tad trivial. I did enjoy some parts of the exploration of Grania's struggles with her inability to hear. Itani seems to mirror some of Grania's struggles with those of Jim, who is away at war working as a medic.
I just wanted this one to be done. I powered through the entire thing in hopes that it was bound to pick up, but it only plodded along slowly, leaving me uninterested in the fates of the characters. I felt so unattached to this one that I was willing to leave it behind on my vacation as a donation to the hotel 'library' in the lobby. Certainly not a rave review, but at least it is likely to be better reading than the romance novels with worn covers and dogeared pages that made up the collection in the hotel's lobby.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is proof that a story need not be complicated or highly inventive to be satisfying and memorable. The plot could scarcely be simpler: Following a bout of scarlet fever at age five, a girl becomes totally deaf; she goes to school, learns to communicate effectively, finds ways to cope with her disability, falls in love and marries; her husband enlists in WWI, survives the worst of trench warfare and comes home. A down-to-earth story, sensitively (but never sentimentally) told. Further enriched by an appealing setting (small town, eastern Ontario) and focusing on three great characters: the quiet, strong, resilient Grania, the courageous, resourceful, articulate Jim — and perhaps best of all, the wise, ever-present grandmother, Mamo. All three of them are, above all, honest personalities; individuals we would like to meet.
Frances Itani never experienced the horror, the misery, the muddy filth of Ypres or the Somme, nor did she personally experience deafness. She is therefore to be lauded for having captured the reality of both of those environments most convincingly. That could not have been accomplished solely through research; clearly, she has gone to great lengths to immerse herself in the consciousness of both Jim and Grania as they struggle to surmount the challenges they face. About his existence in blood-soaked Flanders, Jim muses:
”I see that no civilized person would understand how we live. It would be pointless to explain. No one would believe. ‘Over there’ is a life invented by and known only to ourselves.”
Itani captures so vividly the longing between lovers separated for years by distance and danger, while at the same time reminding us of their unique ways of communicating, sharing moments: while on leave in England, Jim has sent Grania a tiny embroidered silk handkerchief:
”She held the handkerchief and thought of Jim’s hands, his long fingers touching the silk before he made his purchase. She looked again at the picture on the card and tried to imagine this place where he had taken his leave. If she had been with him, she could have seen what he had seen. She could have tucked in against his side as they walked arm in arm, inhaled the grainy air of Folkestone, watched as he described the sound of the dark waves.”
Front and center are two themes: on the one hand the profound silence and isolation of deafness and on the other, the deafening, physically overpowering roar of constant bombardment. But it’s the overriding presence of the third theme that really holds those two worlds together, enables Grania and Jim to survive and makes this novel work: the quiet power of love.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately Frances Itani didn’t have good editorial advice. If she’d had good editorial advice she might have written two good novels instead of this one weak novel. The problem for Itani is that she wanted to tell two stories: one of the experience of a young girl growing up deaf at the turn of the century and one of WW1 trenches (because what Canadian literature needs is *another* WW1 Western Front narrative…). How are these stories connected you ask? Very, very tenuously and not at all in a way that might be loosely construed as interesting. The deaf girl, Grania, meets and falls in love with Jim in the span of six or seven pages and then he’s off to war. This rapid courtship isn’t a historical problem - certainly many couples married and separated for the duration of the war - the problem is that the reader spends the first two hundred odd pages with Grania as she grows up, figures out deaf culture, finds herself, and then with unconvincing speed and heavy-handed touches of intimacy (she says his name “Chim” instead of “Jim” and this is supposed to be satisfactory evidence of their love) she falls in love. Unconvincing I say because the decent into love isn’t depicted. We lose a year or two of Grania’s life and those years just happen to be when she meets and falls in love with Jim. So while the reader cares very much about Grania having experienced her difficult and painful maturation, we care not a whit for her relationship with Jim.

This lack of concern is a problem because the rest of the book - the second half that is (or the second novel as it should have been) - is taken up with Jim’s experiences on the Front (the occasional return to the home-front is even more trying as we try to believe Grania’s misery and longing, but can’t because we don’t believe she fell in love in the first place). Cue the usual descriptions of rats, shell holes, dead and dying best friends, whores and friendly Belgian farmers. There’s no defense for terrible WW1 writing: if it’s going to be poorly written, just don’t bother. It’s not exactly a genre lacking in nuanced exploration or thoughtful consideration.

And so when Jim returns (and of course he returns: this is a Love Story!) and reunits with Grania I felt not relief or joy, but a frustration and annoyance. This book could have been a unique and compelling exploration of the history of deaf culture in Ontario and the consequences of deafness on identity and relationships. Instead it’s a jammed together mess that doesn’t bear reading.

[Penny (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Epic in scope and feeling just like No Man's Land - parts where you were in the war, like Tolkien's book. Written with the beautiful prose like The Summer Before the War.

Tell takes off from where Deafening ends in ways. Instead of the story of Grania, it is centered on Kenan, Grania's sister Tess' husband. So often throughout Deafening Grania would say "Tell", "Tell" when demanding information that she could not hear. I thought that was so interesting. I read Tell before Deafening, even though I have had Deafening on my shelf for a long time. But at no time did I feel like I missed out because I read Tell first. In fact, I think I liked the order in how I read these two beautiful novels. Deafening is the time before and during the Great War and its impact on small town Ontario. Tell is the aftermath, the return of Kenan and his life in that same small town of Deseronto, Ontario.

Itani is the queen of the quietly told story and she shines brightly here with Deafening. I stayed up well past my bedtime to finish!

[Luna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed the start of this book. I liked how Itani described Grania's education, and the development of her and Mamo's relationship. Itani had also delicately emphasised Grania's ability to perceive the world. But what I liked most was how the world perceived her. The way she interacted with others, and how others interacted with her. From Grania's mother, to her sister and grandmother and the people at school. They all interacted with her in different but realistic ways. Furthermore, because this was set in the early 1900s, there wasn't a lot of knowledge on how deafness worked, and how to approach the deaf.

I liked reading about Grania's school. How they were taught, and how Grania eventually came to believe in herself and her ability to learn sign language. How she came to accept that she could be taught, in a manner of speaking. There was a gentle growth of self-assuredness, that she was worthy of learning. I also enjoyed reading about the other deaf students in the school.

And throughout all of this, Itani managed to capture the essence of sound. How would you describe sound to someone who can't hear? It's like trying to describe taste without comparing it to other tastes. How would you describe vanilla ice cream, or a tomato, or yoghurt? Sweet, savoury, they can only go so far. And the same goes with sound. What is exactly is the sound of a car engine, or the tapping of keys on a keyboard, or the touch of a bow along a violin?

This was all amazing, but in the second half of the novel, I felt Itani fell flat. It became a war story, which is all well and good, but I wanted to read more about Grania's growth as a deaf character. I felt the point of the novel fell flat. Jim and Grania's relationship just was. There was no development there. They meet and then they're married. What happened in between? Some parts of the war scenes were heavy handed. War is useless meets war is NOISY. How did this really meet with Grania's world? I just felt Itani wasn't quite sure what direction she wanted the novel to head in.

There were other storylines in here that could have been followed. The one involving Kenan would have worked a lot better, I feel. But ultimately it felt like two (or three) stories mushed together into one. And given Itani previously wrote primarily short stories, I think this is what happened. This isn't a poor or bad novel, as the first part is beautiful. It just didn't quite scratch my itch.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unusual World War I story, told through the eyes of a young deaf woman named Grania. Poignant, well-told, powerful. Very enjoyable.

FAVOURITE QUOTE: “If only he did not have to look at the hands. In death they told more than the face; he knew that now. It was the hands that revealed the final argument: clenched in anger, relaxed in acquiescence, seized in a posture of surprise or forgiveness, or taken unawares. Clawing at a chest, or raised unnaturally in a pleading attitude. How can this be? My life, pulling away?” [p. 204]

[Leigh Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deaf reader reviewing books with deaf characters. This book is listed on my ranked list of books with deaf characters.

As a deaf reader, this story was quite frankly boring. A major goal of the books seems to be more along the lines of teaching hearing readers about the deaf experience rather than entertainment, which is fine, but I was clearly not the intended audience. The author, a descendent of a Deaf woman, did a lot of research for this book. She learned ASL and visited deaf institutes and perused the school's records, all of which is great.

But as I read there are quite a few things that challenge the suspension of disbelief, especially concerning Grania's early home life. Let's get into it:

- Grania is deafened by scarlet fever, aged 5. She is taught to speak her name, and has begun to develop home signs with sister Tress. Fine. But was she not already speaking? After the scarlet fever, she "relearns" speech and the alphabet. I'm not finding any sources that say an effect of scarlet fever is aphasia (exactly one case study mentions a 6-year-old who had motor aphasia–the inability to manipulate the tongue to make speech sounds–but he had full hearing and could understand others' speech), amnesia, or damage to vocal cords. We learn later that the fever made her forget language, but I'm not buying it.
- Grandmother gives her speech lessons, which includes grammatical things like definite/indefinite articles. This doesn't really make sense, since Grania would know those words are there if she's such a great lipreader. And was speaking before she became deaf.
- Grandma and Mom are doing advanced ear-training and oral exercises with Grania. Where did they learn to do this? Historically, the Braidwood family jealously guarded the "secrets" of such exercises, and I'm not sure that Itard's methods of training deaf students were available to the Canadian public, so I find it very strange that these women would know to even try such things.
- Also, the offhand remark that Grania could read lips before she was deaf, according to grandmother, is very out of the ordinary. I can only think that grandmother was making this up, but to what end I don't know. Why would Grania need to read lips as a hearing child? And how would grandmother know this hearing child is reading people's lips? There's no context for this statement.
- At one point, Grania can read a "tight-mouthed" woman's lips from a distance, which is very convenient considering the woman was talking about her. More realistically, Grania can't understand exaggerated speech, and generally suffers from dinner table syndrome and lipreading fatigue. That's why her ability to lipread perfectly from so far away stands out.

Some things that are more realistic are:
- Mother telling Grania to pay attention every second, every minute, or people will think she's stupid. Mother prays for Grania's hearing to come back. Dad is resigned to her deafness, and grandmother is practical about it.
- Grania demanding her sister Tress say/shout words in her ear so she can repeat them, even though she can only feel puffs of air. I remember doing that myself, after seeing my aunt yell into my great-grandfather's ear and seeing he could understand it.
- Grania can lipread a bit, but there are of course mistakes. "When the children taunt, fight back" she reads as, "When the children taught, fight back." Also, when asking about the meaning of "posse," grandmother uses the example sentence: "The sheriff and his posse chase a bad person." Grania misses many of the words and understands, incorrectly, that posse is synonymous with bad person. All that is very realistic.
- Grania is sent to mainstream (hearing) school, where she is placed in the back by herself and cannot lipread the teacher, who moves often. The teacher doesn't bother with her at all. Also a relatable and fairly common experience.
- Eventually Grania is sent to the Ontario School for the Deaf, where she's immersed in deaf culture. She is placed in an Oral and Manual program, and quickly picks up signs from the other students. Because she shows promise, Grania will be placed on the Oral track, which emphasizes speech, and her best friend Fry will be Manual, where children are taught only in signs.
- As an adult, Grania teaches Jim a few signs, but they also have a few home signs/signals so Jim doesn't actually learn to sign. They mostly communicate orally. There are long passages where Grania explains her deaf experience to Jim, who is surprised by all the things, and yet still unmotivated to learn ASL. This is also fairly accurate.

A few things that bother me in the novel:
- The only one who "always understands Grania's voice" is Carlow the dog, which rubs me the wrong way. In a way it feels dehumanizing. If Grania is only able to communicate with an animal that can't communicate back, what does that tell the reader?
- Jim thinks Grania's voice is "musical" because of her deaf accent. I'll never understand the hearing obsession for describing deaf voices as pleasing or musical. (Frances Itani, Tim Lebbon, and Joanna Shupe have all done this, and it sticks out because I've read these novels one after another. It's very annoying, and screams "This deafie isn't like all those other deaf people!!")
- Grania can read Jim's lips no matter distance or distractions, but not in the dark. Oh, except towards the end where the author offhandedly mentions that Grania can, in fact, "read" Jim's lips in the dark by placing her fingertips over his mouth as he forms words. What??
- Jim continually refers to hearing people's gestures as sign language, when these are very different things. A signed language is a full system of communication, like a spoken language. Gestures do not compose a full system of language and can only be used in specific contexts. An example of this is the "come here" gesture, which is a beckoning hand. It's not a language.

Overall, I think this is a good novel for hearing people who are interested in knowing a bit more about the deaf experience, but I wish the author had been a little more conscientious about some word choices and had taken less romantic license.

[Cherie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are times when one does not want to hurry their way through reading a book. In the case of this one, it is doubly so. First because of the beautiful prose and second because of the subject matter. This was a beautifully written and wonderfully researched book regarding being deaf and learning to grow up in a hearing world. All of the characters are beautifully written and the landscape and weather in Ontario are as much a character in the story as the people in it.

The second part of the story, taking place in France during WWI, is also beautifully written but painful. So hard to read about. The war conditions, the shelling, the war torn country side, the mud and rain and cold, and the horror of the death encountered, not only of the men fighting, but the animals - horses and mules slaughtered by the thousands.

The family and the young girl encountered at the beginning of the story are not the same people at the ending of the story. They grew up and lived through those war torn years, and some died. How they did it and how they coped is beautifully told.

There was a quote from a newspaper article towards the ending of the story that I thought was amazing. Someone has sprung the question: "Can the deaf think?" Why not ask a few more: "Can the deaf eat?" "Can the deaf sleep?" "Can the deaf breathe?" It strikes us that the fool killer-misses a good many possible swats with his club.

[Olivermagnus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is partially inspired by the experiences of the Frances Itani's deaf grandmother. It is the story of Grania, a little girl growing up in southern Ontario in the early years of the 20th century, who is struck deaf by scarlet fever at the age of five. We first meet Grania as she and her family try to come to terms with her sudden disability. When she is nine she's sent to the nearby Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville for seven years of segregated education, where she's allowed no visitors or trips back home.

The story continues with Grania growing up and falling in love with Jim Lloyd, a hearing man she meets through her job at the school hospital. The two marry but are soon separated by World War I when Jim goes overseas to work as a stretcher bearer in an ambulance unit. At this point the story splits the narrative between both of them, and we follow both Grania and Jim during the war years.

I've had this book on my TBR for quite a long time and was glad I finally had the chance to read it. It's a book about hope and despair, but also about love and loss. There was a depth to this story that was unexpected. I enjoyed the way the author used vivid descriptions of the place and era. It was also very educational to witness WWI from the Canadian perspective. In some ways it reminded me of The Cartographer of No Man's Land. Both are excellent stories.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should really be 3.5 stars, but I rounded down. I adore the premise of this book: a deaf girl growing up in Canada in the early 1900s who falls in love with a hearing man who goes away to war. I love war stories, especially involving women, I love love stories, and Grania’s deafness adds a really fascinating dimension to the old war romance story. A+ for the general plot idea.

The problem is in the execution. The first third of the book is quite interesting and lovely – it’s all about Grania growing up deaf, her interactions with her family, and her education. There was some seriously beautiful writing in the first bit.

The problems started with the introduction of Jim, the love interest. He just appears, they fall in love, and are married. Within like a chapter. We don’t get to see them falling in love, we’re just told that they ARE wildly in love. I feel like this has been happening in the books I’ve been reading lately a lot – there’s supposed to be an epic love story, but we don’t actually see the two characters falling in love. We get a meet-cute, and then we’re told they fall in love and have this connection that transcends everything else. Um, okay? This feels like lazy writing to me. Don’t TELL me how in love they are or how much they miss/understand/worship each other, SHOW me. I would have loved to read about Grania and Jim’s courtship – what was it like for a deaf girl to date a hearing boy in the early twentieth century? I don’t know, because Itani skipped over this part completely. I was disappointed.

Then the war starts, and Jim goes off to the front lines as a stretcher bearer. There were some beautiful passages in the novel during Jim’s part, but it was nothing really new (war is hell, soldiers get numb, and so on) and because I didn’t see the courtship between Grania and Jim, I didn’t really feel like I knew Jim so I had a hard time caring about him at all. In fact, I ended up being more interested in Grania’s relationships with Tress, Kenan, and Mamo than her relationship with Jim. Which is not a bad thing by itself, but I don’t think this was what the author intended, and also it made me kind of bored with Jim’s chapters.

So, I think this book got off on the right foot and I really liked the concept behind it, but I also think it could have used some editing and revision. It’s a little disappointing – there’s so much potential in this story, but by the end it just kind of fell flat. A good book, but it could have been great.

[Poiema · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazingly tender and beautifully written account of a deaf child, her struggles to understand the world of sound, and her ultimate victory in achieving her life purpose as an adult. The struggles of Grania's growing up years were softened by the unfailing love and support of her Irish Grandmother, who devoted her life to enabling Grania to succeed. I loved the secret communications that developed between Grania and her sister, and later the unique and sweet language of love shared with her hearing husband. The author creates an aura of mystery about the wonder of sound, and it caused me to appreciate it in new ways--- to perhaps feel it, apart from using my ears

The book divides neatly into two distinct segments, and frankly I wondered why the author didn't make the second part a sequel. It moved away from Grania's story and became a historical fiction account of her husband's WWI experience in Europe. This part of the story was well researched, but a little on the graphic side. It was a definite contrast to the more tender telling of Grania's childhood in part I. I didn't enjoy this part as much, though it did come to a satisfying conclusion.

Overall, I can recommend this book on the strength of the author's creative and sensitive rendering of the world of sound.

[Jane Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing. The writing style took a bit of time to relate to but it was a story told from the perspective of a deaf woman. It was a profoundly moving story that takes the reader through Grania's illness that results in deafness at age 5 through her growing into a woman, falling in love and waiting for her husband's return from WWI. Through the story you begin to feel that Grania is the strong one, the one most aware of her world and the hearing world. Her connection to both worlds is mostly in part to her beautiful and loving relationship with her Mamo (Grandmother). Mamo tells a lovely story of how Grania got her name (derived from an Irish word meaning love). Grania's strength comes from her absent world of sound, while her husband finds his strength in music and sound. By sharing their unique worlds with each other they produce a love that endures through illness and war. The book is full of beautiful, quotable dialog that frequently had me shedding tears. I became absorbed by the characters and their unique ways of dealing with a less than ideal life. This novel is Canadian Frances Itani's debut novel. What a way to start...I look forward to reading her next book.

[Shelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! If L.M. Montgomery and Erich Maria Remarque had a baby. . .

This is the first of Itani’s books that I have read. It won’t be the last. Her slow, quiet, cumulative writing style captures simple details one on top of the other to create unforgettable images and precious characters I will carry with me for some time. Deafening is a book about love, loss, language and the ability of the human spirit to carry on, to bear the sorrow—ours and others—and to survive, if not triumph. In the book, we learn that there are no miracles in the traditional sense of the word, but that miracles lie in our ability to move forward, anyway. Find a cozy spot and take some time with this book. You won’t be sorry.

For a review that does this book justice, see Ron Charles.
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[Rosana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tender and deeply moving book. Frances Itani tells the story of a deaf woman (loosely inspired on her own deaf grandmother), waiting for her young husband’s return from WWI with superb prose. The complexity of what is or isn’t communicate in every relationship, the loneliness of disconnect, and ultimately the healing power of love, family and friendship is weaved through the plot with mastery.

I am looking forward to Itani’s next book.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this novel but I definitely didn't love it. Itani focused more than half the book on the war. I was hoping she would've wrote more on Grainy's experiences at school where she spent the majority of her adolescence. I feel that if she spent more with Grainy during those years I would've then felt a deeper connection to her. Instead she skips over from the age of 9 to 19 within a few pages.

The courtship between Grainy and Jim is very short due to his enlistment in the war but I wish Itani wrote more of their relationship even though their courtship was short. Once again I didn't really connect with them as a couple.

Then once Jim leaves for the war, Itani continues with their relationship through correspondence and flips between these two characters. The majority of the novel was on Jim and what he was going through. The aspects of war, as horrible as they were became very repetitive in the book.

Itani touches on Grainy's education and how deaf students were seen as outsiders. She does a wonderful job explaining how deafness occurred through disease and the effects of this tragedy, especially during war time. I also found it very interesting how sign language was perceived so negatively. And in many instances was banned as a form of communication.

A more detailed account of Grainy's education as well as how the school progressed through history would've made this novel great. She touches on such a great topic but doesn't expand on it.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extraordinary work of writing skill, research and storytelling. I read this in 2003 and it remains one of the few books I keep on my shelf not to be loaned out. I reread it every now and then as I miss Grania. The subsequent trilogy was a poignant farewell to characters and places that I came to love. My mother Maura Strevens, was a close friend of Frances and was noted in the acknowledgments. I always search her name out and cherish this treasured and honoured place in one of my favourite novels.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. I liked the different perspectives you get from the family members about Grania's deafness. It is a part of history I never really thought about.

One thing this book made me realize is I really don't like reading stories about world war one. Just the senseless human loss grates on me. It is so sad. But, at the same time it is good to remember.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book that somehow manages to convert both silence and sound using just the written word. Grania loses her hearing to Scarlet Fever at the age of five. We grow with her as she navigates the world of sound I silence, we go with her to the Ontario school for the Deaf and Dumb, we grow with her and we fall in love with her hearing husband with her. It's I writes beautifully about the husband, Jim's experiences in WWI trenches and about the silent Homefront. There was a surprising bit at the end about quarantines and the Spanish flu epidemic that seemed timely. My only complaint was that the story moved slowly. This book took a while to read, partly because I wanted to read every detailed sentence but also because the pace was slow and meandering. I generally like to be a little more wrapped up in a plot.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written novel about the struggle of a young girl, Grania, living in Deseronto, Ontario in 1902 who is rendered deaf after a bout of scarlet fever. After being sent to Belleville, Ontario to attend the school for the Deaf, she falls in love with a hearing man named Jim. Grania, due to her deafness pronounces her husband's name Chim. Jim is sent into World War 1 to be a stretcher bearer and through letters home to Grania, tries to maintain their language of love, silence and 'fingers on lips.'

From back cover:

"Set on the eve of the Great War and spanning two continents, DEAFENING tells the story of Grania, a young deaf woman living in small-town Ontario, who falls in love with Jim, a hearing man. In wonderment, they create a new emotional vocabulary of sound and silence.

As the First World War explodes across Europe, Jim leaves to become a stretcher bearer on the Western Front, a place filled with unforgiving noise, violence and death. Through this long war of attrition, Jim and Grania attempt to sustain their love in a world as brutal as it is beautiful."

[Dorie - Cats&Books :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This masterfully written saga takes us from 1903 through 1919 during the life of Grania O'Neill, a young woman, deaf since an illness she had at a young age. Never have I felt as though I somewhat understood the world of the deaf until this book. The characters in this novel are exceptionally well described in all aspects of their personality, and there are lots of memorable characters.

Grania, her mother, her grandmother "Mamo", her childhood friends, and the love of her life -- Jim Lloyd, a man who has hearing.

When reading the chapters written through Grania's eyes the book is graceful and almost quiet, then switching to Jim's accounting of the horrors of the war it becomes "DEAFENING".

This is a very powerful story evoking dramatic images of WWI and the struggles of a deaf young woman to be accepted as a "normal" and even gifted person.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone and think it would be a great book club book with many characters and situations to discuss.

[Renee · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know somewhere in this book is a beautiful story. The first 75 pages were pretty fascinating. The story of Graine as a child, and her struggles with being deaf were very interesting, and rung true.

However, somewhere along the lines she grew up and fell in love.. which the book failed to spend any time on! At the end of one chapter, she meets Jim, and then, in the next chapter they are getting married!! HELLO! Where is the love story???

So yeah, I tried, but I could not trudge through the rest of the book, because frankly, I didn't give a crap about this Jim character that randomly showed up. And, all Graine could talk or think about was Jim - and yet, I have no idea why, because there was zero love story.

I skipped to the end to see what happens. Well, I won't put in a spoiler, but 400 pages is about 250 pages too long.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frances Itani is one of my favorite Canadian writers. A former nurse, a woman who has traveled and worked in many parts of the world, a wife and a mother, she is a poet as well as an award-winning novelist.

This story, published in 2003, takes place in Deseronto Ontario just before and during the Great War and is presented in five sections. In the first, we meet Grania O’Neil whose family owns a hotel in the town. When Grania is five, she contacts scarlet fever and is left deaf. Agnes, her heart-broken mother, prays for the miracle that will return her daughters hearing, but her more practical grandmother Mamo, takes matters in hand and teaches her granddaughter to communicate with the hearing world and to read. During this time at home, Grania is cocooned in her supportive family and grows close to her older sister Tress with whom she has her own way of communicating. However, the teacher at school has little time or patience with Grania and it is Mamo who finally convinces her parents to send her to the school for the deaf in Brockville when she is nine. There she learns sign language and how to read lips.

In section two, time moves forward to 1915. Grania is nineteen, has graduated and is working in the infirmary at the school where she meets Jim Lloyd, a man who is able to hear. They fall in love and marry but after barely two weeks, Jim is off to the war in Europe where he takes on the role of stretcher bearer. With his friends Irish and Stash, he collects the battered and dead bodies of his comrades and suffers from the terrible, relentless noise of exploding bombs and mortar fire. He sees the endless slaughter on the battlefields as men are blown to bits before his eyes and there is blood and body parts everywhere. The death of his close friend Irish sends him reeling and he falls silent, speaking only to the dead. It is only his love for Grania that keeps him going.

The third and fourth section covers the period from 1916 to 1918. Jim and Grania write to one another and the narrative travels between the two, as Jim experiences the horrors of war and Grania waits patiently at home, dreading the terrible telegram that may arrive saying her husband has been lost or killed. The Spanish flu has begun its deadly march across the world and some who survive the war are felled by the disease, including those at home. Grania becomes ill and lives only because of the care of her grandmother.

By the time the narrative reaches section five, the war is over. Some men come home and some do not. Those who return are wounded physically and emotionally; no one returns unchanged by their horrible experience. Among them is Tress’s husband Kenan, who comes home badly mutilated, so traumatized he is unable to speak. Grania who understands his silent world, helps to bring him back to life. She does not need to be able to speak to communicate with him; her life has taught her how to speak and listen without the use of language.

Itani excels at including the details necessary for readers to appreciate the complexities of speech and what can so easily lead to misunderstanding and confusion when people communicate. She has an excellent understanding of what it is like to live in a world without sound, enhanced by her meticulous research and her experience with her grandmother who was deaf. Her narrative reflects the deep contrast between Grana’s hearing world and the relentless noise Jim experiences on the battlefield. She manages all the shifts in tone and time smoothly, as she moves the story from the quiet Ontario town where families wait for their loved ones, to the noise filed battlefields in Europe, where men fight to survive.

Although this story is at times grim and sad, Itani skillfully avoids sentimentality, as her narrative describes the opposing worlds of war and peace, language and silence and separation and attachment. She is especially adept at bringing readers to an understanding of the complexities of both silence and sound and how they can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. Her language is spare, like the poet she was before she became a novelist, able to communicate so much with just a few words.

This well written novel has interesting characters that easily win the readers’ sympathy and several profoundly moving scenes. Itani’s portrayal of Grania is enhanced by her ability to allow the reader into Grania’s head, allowing them to feel every bit of emotion, from Grania’s frustration at learning to speak, to fear her husband will not return, to the tender way she holds her husband on the railway platform when he arrives home in 1919 suffering from shell shock. He sobs uncontrollably while he holds her and keeps repeating the word “wife” and then “sorrow”. That scene has so few words, but is very powerful. As Grania holds her husband, her strength is reflected in her inner words, that “sorrow can be borne”. Readers know they will struggle, but they will find a way forward.

This is simply, a beautiful, well-crafted book, one I highly recommend.

[Victoria Morwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘One more complication. The language of the hearing was never simple. Language is our battleground, Grania thought. The one over which we fight, but with no desire to be part of the conflict’

Being immersed in a deaf person’s world was eye opening and frustrating all at once. Especially following Grania as a child, so isolated in her quiet; struggling to follow language and meaning, and make sense of the people around her.
I loved her relationship to her sister Tress, the connection they had was incredible - and her grandmother! what a fabulous character, so full of love.
Her parents were very much in the background, they didn’t seem to be able to relate to her, or have the time for their children.
I loved the school chapters. School played an instrumental role in developing Grania’s character, although heartbreaking at first, it was a warm, kind place that showed her she had a real place in the world.
- and Jim. The parallel story of his time as a stretcher bearer in France was gripping and horrifying. Such a story of humanity at its most basic level - terror, camaraderie, loyalty, survival, hope. I loved their love story, and how he filled in the gaps of her understanding about the world with his descriptions of sound. Sound takes on a physical quality in this book, and i have never considered how sound ‘feels’ or imagined how to describe the waves of the ocean.

Finally, i appreciated the level of research the author took on, and that it was in part based on her deaf grandmother who had attended the school for the deaf and dumb in Belleville in the early 1900’s.

[Helga Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set during 1915-19 in Ontario, Canada, the US, England, Belgium and France during the Great War, this debut novel tells two stories. It is coming of age story of Grania who was struck deaf by Scarlet fever at age 5 and what living with deafness is like and the story about the experience of her husband, Jim in WWII France.

After Grania is enrolled in the Ontario School for the deaf in Belleville, she thrives. She meets Jim Loyd, a hearing man with whom she creates a new vocabulary that uses sound and silence. While Jim, is in Flanders where he is a stretcher bearer, they write letters back and forth to sustain themselves. Jim has horrific experiences at the Front-on some major battles, in the world of war, violence and sound during their long years of waiting. Events happen quickly-the Spanish Flu sweeps the town, it’s followed by Armistice (Nov1918) and demobilization. When Jim returns home, they have both changed and neither will understand fully what they went through but they must move on and forward.

This multilayered story that explores the harsh life of the deaf and the battleground is filled with compassion, love, strength and spirit to overcome adversities. It has great depth, plot descriptions of thought and the era. It is good story telling.

[Mandy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

My niece recommended this book and I enjoyed it so much! I haven’t read much before about WWI, Canada, or deafness and I really appreciated the way that the author handled some difficult material. Grania lost her hearing to scarlet fever when she was 5 and through the love and determination of her grandmother she was able to learn and thrive. That story alone was beautiful enough, but added to it is Grania’s love story with Jim and their separate experiences of WWI; she on the home front and him as a stretcher bearer.

In some ways, the storytelling style reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lucy Maude Montgomery even though the book was written in 2008.

[Robert Ronsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult to pinpoint what makes this book enjoyable. To take the negatives first: there is a lot of 'tell' and the viewpoint shifts unexpectedly in the middle of chapters and even inside paragraphs. These tics usually jolt me out of the narrative but here the strength of the storytelling and the, to me, unique perspective of being inside the mind of a deaf person overcame my resistance and swept me to the book's conclusion.
The research that went into this book must have been prodigious but it is borne lightly and we only learn in the acknowledgements how much this was a labour of love. It appears that the story was based on the life of the author's grandmother.
I picked this book up from a holiday swap shelf and I'm so glad I did. It was the only English language book there and, judging by the blurb, it wouldn't have been my choice had I had one. A serendipitous discovery.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving and beautifully written story of love and loss, history and hope. My grandparents lived on the Bay of Quinte and I attended a nearby boarding school. We regularly drove past the School for the Deaf, so Grania’s story of being a student there to learn how to navigate in a hearing world was particularly meaningful. I especially loved her relationship with her beloved Mamo.