Iris

Iris is the main character of the novel. She is a deaf teenager living in Houston, attending school and trying to carve out a comfortable life for herself there even when many people do not know how to deal with her deafness. She seems friendly and curious, but is frustrated by the way her classmates and many of her teachers treat her as though she does not exist or is somehow "other" from everyone else. Symbolically, her main passion is that she likes to restore old radios that she finds in junkyards and antique stores, moved by the fact that they have been left for the garbage to never be heard again. However, she in essence trades this passion in for her passion for whales later on.

She forms a strong connection with a whale she learns about in her science class named Blue 55. She feels great affinity...