El Deafo (Cece Bell)

A charming story, told in graphic novel form with everyone as anthropomorphic bunny rabbits, which is a fictionalized memoir of the author's childhood growing up with a profound hearing loss. It is, as she emphasizes in the afterword, only one person's story of one way to be deaf, and her strong desire to fit into the hearing world and resist learning sign language will probably earn the ire of many in the Deaf community. I appreciated the honesty of the story, though, including the angst of difficult friendships, budding crushes, and struggles to fit in. We all have things that make us different, some more than others, and we all struggle to find our way in our complex social world, so her story is not that different from anyone's. I recommend it, especially for someone who is or has a child with anything that can be labeled as a disability.