“Marsh creates excellent tension in a story based on true elements.
A SIGN OF HER OWN
by Sarah Marsh (Tinder Press, $37.99)
It’s the fast-changing world of Boston and London in the 1870s, a time of invention and industrialisation. Our heroine, Ellen Lark, is a bright young woman who became deaf at the age of four after scarlet fever. Now in her teens, she is studying speech with Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born Boston University professor and inventor.
Bell, whose mother was deaf, teaches deaf students to speak through his father’s method, Visible Speech. He is strongly anti-sign language among the deaf community, seeing it as isolating. Many deaf and mute schools at the time punished children for using it rather
