Book Review: Children of a Lesser God

"Until you let me be an "I," the way you are, you can never come inside my silence."

"I heard. I heard every word, g****** it. I translated for myself.  It went from your hands into my brain and out my mouth…You want to be on your own. You don't want to be pitied.  Then you learn to read my lips and use your mouth for something besides showing me you're better than hearing girls in bed. Read my lips. What am I saying? You want to talk to me, then you learn my language. Speak!"

Hello there.  I am back with another book review. 

I guess that this one is technically a play review, but I read it like a book (with the exception that I tend to read play scripts aloud when I read them like books). As such, I am going to treat it like a book. 

I first heard about this play when I was in high school from my ASL teacher, but I never got around to seeing the movie, reading the play, or anything like that.  Then, when I was a BYU, BYU drama put the play on, and I considered going to see it, but I never did.  Anyways, I finally remembered that I had always wanted to know more about this play, so I put a hold on the script at the library, and then I read it.

Children of a Lesser God is a story about a speech therapist named James, and the Deaf girl that he is challenged with teaching, Sarah.  Sarah refuses to learn to lipread or talk, and has driven speech therapists to quitting in the past.  Eventually, James finds himself falling in love with her, and she with him.  But that doesn't change anything about how she feels towards him as a hearing person.

In the long run, this is really a story about Deaf-hearing relations, and how disability interacts with the rest of society. 

The first act was so completely aggravating, because it just felt like a vehicle for pushing Deaf rights.  Not that I don't agree that there has been a lot of paternalism in the way that we treat the hearing impaired, I just don't think it's always reasonable for them to act like there's nothing wrong with them.  They cannot interact with society without the assistance of an interpreter, that means they have a disability. (FYI:  that's kind of one of the points of the story actually--how do you create autonomy when autonomy destroys the autonomy?).  In fact, I got so annoyed with the first act that I wanted to throw the script across the room.

But, in the second act, it started to actually delve into the complexities of Deaf rights, and the relationships between hearing and deaf.  It actually turned into a powerful story of love, and connecting to other people, and learning to respect other people--on a deeper level than their ability to hear or not hear. 

While reading it, the SEE-English-ASL got monotonous to read, but I'm sure that would be resolved in actual performance of the story. 

All in all, I did enjoy reading this story, and I am glad that I did.  4 stars.