You might think of several reasons for learning sign language, but you probably haven’t thought of it as a way to communicate with the dead. That’s what 8-year-old Anna Levy tries to do after her younger sister Megan drowns on the family’s Cape Cod vacation in Rachel Stolzman's A Sign for Drowning.

“Nobody said Megan was beyond even silent words," Anna says. “I learned sign language. I wasn’t told that death is farther than that.” Desperate for a way to talk to Megan and reverse the past, Anna enters a private world in which sign becomes a secret language and a metaphor for communication with memory and her own inner self.

But over the years she outgrows this idea, and eventually uses her ASL to become the director of a center for deaf children in New York.

Using Sign Language to Help Deaf Community
Anna’s asides on the nuances of sign language and deaf culture can be a pleasure to read, as when she notes, “Of course sign language can accommodate lies, but I am certain that the deaf lie less than hearing people.”

Her portrayal of the deaf community is strong and unsentimental. But the idea of sign language or deafness as something mystical might not sit well with readers who have a skeptical eye for disability appearing as anything but a physical condition.

Learned speech and lip reading take on other meanings here as well. Anna decides to take her adopted daughter Adrea to France for a six-week course in speech therapy. Although Anna, and Stolzman, understand the controversy over imposing adaptations to the hearing world on deaf children, Adrea’s new skills are accepted by others in the community, and her efforts at speech are presented as symbols of her personal growth.

The real reward in The Sign for Drowning is Stolzman’s precise language and her ability to capture her characters’ emotional lives with insightful and telling detail. She explores the familiar ground of grief, family relationships, and self-doubt with sensitivity and intelligence.

The Sign for Drowning
by Rachel Stolzman
Publisher: Random House Inc
Pub. Date: June 2008
ISBN-13: 9781590305874
192pp