Review by Kevin Brown
A Sign of Her Own, Sarah Marsh’s debut novel, follows Ellen Lark, a girl who lost her hearing when she was four due to Scarlet Fever. Her mother and paternal grandmother—her father worked away from the family, then died—send her to school, then to work with Alexander Graham Bell, to learn lip-reading and Visible Speech, a phonetic means of pronunciation. Essentially, they want her to be able to pass as a person who is able to hear others.
Ellen fully embraces this approach, though there are hints of dissatisfaction early in the novel, even before she works with Bell. That unhappiness becomes fully developed when she meets Frank, as he grew up in a largely Deaf family—his mother is the exception—and community. She sees the joy of communication they have with one another, not through trying to imitate those who are able to hear, but by fully embracing their culture, especially signing.
Bell’s work on the telephone is in the background throughout the novel, especially the possibility that he stole the idea from Elisha Gray, reinforcing the overall idea of (mis)communication and (missed) connections. Ellen’s lip-reading often leads to misinterpretation, and numerous characters accidentally or willfully misunderstand each other.
Marsh clearly portrays the Deaf community’s internal conflict over signing versus lip-reading/English (heightened by external actors, such as Bell). Ellen has to learn who she is and who she wants to be, which will ultimately help her find the community she needs.
A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh. Park Row Books, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite