Genre
Bildungsroman
Setting and Context
Colson, Ohio, around the present time
Narrator and Point of View
Narrator: omniscient;
Point of view: third person
Tone and Mood
Contemplative
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Charlie; Antagonist: Charlie's mother, the educational system that fails the deaf children
Major Conflict
The main protagonist Charlie is a deaf teenage girl who enrolls into a River Valley School for the Deaf and soon realizes that she's far behind her peers because of her parents' refusal to let her learn sign language. Battling her integration into school and her mother's disapproval, Charlie, as well as other students, are unaware that their headmistress received news of the school shutting down soon.
Climax
February finds Charlie, Austin and Eliot on their way to destroy the Edge Bionics plant responsible for the creation of faulty and dangerous hearing aids. She takes them home, but turns a blind eye to Charlie's friend Slash and his crew on following through with the plan.
Foreshadowing
"They escaped, more like it, though that makes the school sound like a prison."
- The novel begins with the foreshadowing of the end, of the main protagonist and her friends gone missing from school for some unknown reason.
Understatement
"It was an ordinary clash of personalities, and that made it all worse."
- and understatement of Charlie's and her mother's complicated relationship and the toxic behavior of her mother.
Allusions
N/A
Imagery
The novel is intertwined with images visually showing the instructions of certain words and phrases in sign language.
Paradox
"...she hadn't fit in, and it had been deafness, great and glaring, that made it so."
Parallelism
"She continued this way for a few weeks, using the collapse of her school to distract herself from her mother's departure and her mother's departure as an excuse for not talking to Mel about school."
Metonymy and Synecdoche
"...her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn't yet, all in perpetual existence in her fingertips."
Personification
"...the world, swift and savage, having moved on without her."
