Language and Communication

As a Deaf adolescent with an immediate family that can all hear, in a school that lacks any resources for Deaf students and with no Deaf peers, Iris finds it very difficult to communicate with the people around her, and often feels frustrated and lashes out at those same people. For one, her father has not taken the time to learn how to use sign language at anything beyond the minimum level required, and he has great difficulty communicating with Iris as a result. When she has her initial conversation with her family about going to Alaska to meet Blue 55, she has to angrily tell her mother to not "'interpret anymore'" for her father when he complains that he cannot understand what she is talking about (107). Meanwhile, at school, a classmate named Nina who thinks she is an expert in sign language because "she'd...