All of these characters are about to have a very tumultuous year. The fifth generation of his family to be deaf, Austin is something like aristocracy within his community. Headmistress February Waters-the hearing child of deaf parents-asks Austin Workman to help Charlie acclimate to her new environment. The child of hearing parents, Charlie has a cochlear implant and has barely mastered the ASL alphabet when she transfers from her public high school to River Valley School for the Deaf. This presents Charlie Serrano with a challenge. It is, instead, a language with its own grammar, its own idioms, and its own stylistic flourishes. By using this phrase as her title, the author is underscoring the point that ASL is not just English rendered in hand gestures. True biz is an expression in American Sign Language that has a variety of English translations-“for sure,” “seriously,” “no joke,” and “totally” among them. The author of America Is Immigrants (2019) and Girl at War (2015) goes deep into Deaf culture.
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