In This Sign
by Joanne Greenberg
19 August 2025
This was wonderful! Picked up at random from the library shelf during a reading slump and it totally sucked me in and captivated me.
It’s a family saga really, published in 1970, and we follow Abel and Janice from their early adulthood in the 1920s through their lives until they are more or less up to the publication date in the 1960s. It dips back in time to show scenes from their childhood, and some of it is pretty traumatic. Both halves of the couple are deaf and we are thrown straight into the challenges they face in a hearing world right at the beginning of the book. Abel is up in court for reneging on a finance agreement to buy a car as he’s totally not understood what he was signing up for. Faced with crippling debt to the court they face a couple of decades of austerity which they face with bravery but it made me really angry that this happened to them. But that anger I felt was a good hook into the story and I wanted them to find better times.
There’s so much good stuff here and it’s really well written. The couple communicate in sign language, and their hearing children pick this up as well. The aversion they have to using this in public and the general lack of acceptance of it as a method of communication was pretty startling to me. The idea that you’d stop deaf children from learning sign language seems utterly bizarre but apparently it’s been pretty common. I did not realise how badly this was seen as in the past (and maybe not just in the past?).
The story of overcoming adversity and making a good life anyway is great. I liked seeing the challenges that their children faced as they basically had spoken language as their second language, and they way that they dealt with that. That disability doesn’t equal stupidity but how it’s often perceived as that is a thread running all through the book. It was eye-opening and informative and a completely delightful read and I really recommend it.
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