This is a wonderful story of loss and love centered around Anna and her adopted child, Adrea, who is deaf. Anna witnessed the accidental drowning of her 5 year old sister, Megan, when she was just 8 years old. Although her family remained intact, Anna and her parents have never fully recovered from the loss. After the drowning, Anna and her parents begin to drift apart, each grieving, but splintered as a family. In order to try to communicate with Megan, Anna begins studying American Sign Language. She grows into an adult and becomes a teacher for hearing-impaired children. The story is told from Anna’s POV as an adult and her path to healing through the adoption of Adrea, a child who is deaf. The author intersperses snippets of the past to give us a better sense of Anna and who she is in the present and how she came to be where she is. We also learn how Adrea came into her life. There are many beautiful moments in the story between Adrea and Anna that will bring tears to your eyes. The author is able to capture the raw emotions of Anna as she tries to understand and come to terms with the loss of her sister through the adoption and mothering of Adrea. This is a beautifully written story and a quick read at only 193 pages, but it’s very raw and emotional. I recommend it highly.
-Seededbuzz, February 2010
The Sign for Drowning is a deeply and profoundly poetic as well as lyrical novel about love and loss and the beauty of family. Anna watched helplessly as her younger sister drowned and her way of coping as an eight year old was by learning sign language. She believed at such a tender age that she could communicate with her sister through sign language. As an adult, Anna moved to New York and began working as a teacher at the Deaf and Hearing Center where she dotes on the young students she is in charge of while relishing in the solitude and the safety in the sameness of the days. One day Anna meets Andrea, whom she mistakenly refers to as Adrea, a five-year-old orphan, who weaves her way into Anna's heart and life. As Anna grows into the role of a single mother of a deaf child, Anna struggles with loving, learning to live in the present and coming to terms with the profound pain of losing her sister. Compounding Anna's healing process is her lack of relationship with her mother. As a new mother herself, the pain and isolation becomes more pronounced despite Anna's father's unconditional love, as she craves the love from the one person who cannot offer her what she needs, her mother. Stolzman's first novel is one that will grab the reader's attention and hold it throughout the entire novel. The Sign for Drowning is an amasing novel about the fragility of life and finding oneself through healing. This book will stay with the reader long after the book has been closed.
-Rundpinne, December 2009
Rachel Stolzman's debut novel is beautifully written and taps into everyone's need to connect with someone outside themselves; healing past wounds in the process.
The Sign for Drowning is about Anna, a woman who has grown up haunted by her younger sister's death. Keeping the world at bay, she delves into the world of sign language at first as an imaginary way to communicate with her sister, and later it will bring into her life Adrea. Adrea is one of the deaf students at the school for deaf children where Anna works,and quickly Anna discovers that for the first time since her sister's death somone has access to her heart.
What follows is Anna's journey into her past where she faces the devestating memories of her sisters death. With Adrea's complete innocence and need for a mother, Anna may find the balm to finally soothe her wounded spirit. If only she could find the courage to let the young girl in.
This book really touched my heart, and just LOOK at the COVER! Georgous, right? Stolzman's knowledge of American Sign Language and the culture of the deaf community resounds as a very sturdy backdrop for this story. It renewed my interest in learning ASL, and the descriptions of the signs in the book are very easy to visualize. The book takes you through Anna's life in a gentle way and allowing you to experience her healing through the unconditional love of a little girl. It also touched me on the adoption front as well. Our youngest daughter is adopted, and there were several sections where I was nodding my head in agreement to some of the feelings Anna shared towards her daughter in respect to her being adopted. FANTASTIC!
I highly recommend this book!
- Bookblab November 2009
"The book opens with what I would think of as every parents worst nightmare… what is interesting is that this books focus is more on how the sister Anna has grown up with the grief of the loss of her sister.
With this book I entered a world I have not known… the world of sign language as Anna grows into adulthood and becomes a teacher for deaf children… even adopting one of the children she has worked with, Adrea. While reading through the new relationship struggles between Anna (now mother) and Andrea.. I found myself almost holding my breath to see how this would break down the barriers that Anna was still holding tight to in the loss of her sister.
This is a book where I learned more about a world of silence… that spoke volumes once I entered it."
- One Person's Journey Through A World of Books
"As Stolzman's character-driven debut opens, eight-year-old Anna Levy and her mother witness a horrific scene: the small boat that her five-year-old sister, Megan, is on with their father capsizes close to shore, and Megan drowns. In the immediate aftermath, Anna blames herself for not plunging into the water and joining the frantic search. She begins an imaginary, one-sided conversation in sign language with Megan that leads the grown-up Anna to adopt a deaf five-year-old (whom she mistakenly renames "Adrea" by incorrectly signing "Andrea") and to a career working with deaf children. As Anna and Adrea grow into their lives together, watchful Anna is forced to confront ghosts from her past and to learn to stop living life as a spectator. Stolzman gives Anna a poetic soul ("words of sympathy had exhausted my tolerance for words themselves"), and a carefully constructed redemption that unfolds with vivid observational detail."
-Publishers Weekly
"By offering her heroine's hesitant optimism through such disarmingly honest confessions, Stolzman exhibits an authentic emotional and narrative integrity, an impressive feat for a debut novelist. Stolzman brings this lyrical sensibility to an elegiac tale of a family's heart-stopping tragedy and hard-won redemption, in which a tarnished silence can once again be made to shine through the resonate power of love."
-Foreword Magazine
"At a time when cool, ironic fiction is too much the rage, here is a novel written straight from the heart, a tender yet fearless portrait of a loving family crippled by grief. Rachel Stolzman reminds us what kind of stories matter, and move us, the most."
-Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Whole World Over
"Reminiscent of Ian McEwan's The Child in Time and Frederick Reichen's The Odd Sea, this is a moving and important novel. Rachel Stolzman's story about a woman's attempts to find order in the broken world she inhabits deftly captures grief and the struggle to live within its lifelong specter."
-Bret Lott, author of Jewel and A Song I Knew by Heart
"Against the themes of loss and mourning in this radiant novel are balanced those of nurturing and hope."
-Roy Hoffman, author of Chicken Dreaming Corn and Almost Family
"Rendered in spare and original prose, The Sign for Drowning is a piercing and poignant tale of loss and love. Rachel Stolzman writes from the heart and speaks to the heart. This haunting first novel is the story of unspeakable horror and extraordinary beauty."
-Patty Dann, author of The Goldfish Went on Vacation
"It's a delicately balanced novel, spare but not taciturn, emotional but not overwrought, and finally hopeful but not unnaturally cheerful."
-Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
"I read often and I can honestly say that there are only a few books that I feel as though I just can not put down. This book was one of them. I read it in just two sittings and nearly missed my stop on the train! It is hard to believe that this is Rachel Stolzman's debut novel."
-Dr. Sharon Pajka, Galluadet University
"A poignant look at one woman's efforts to overcome the personal childhood tragedy of losing her sister. I like stories about hope, and this one fits the bill. Just beware that you may shed a few tears on the way. Remarkable debut novel."
-LazyReaders.com
"This story is about Anna, a young girl who witnesses her younger sister's drowning, and how that impacts her family dynamics and her ability to relate to others. The horrible tragedy alters her parent's relationships to each other and to Anna and as they struggle against their own grief, their family is drawn apart. Anna learns sign language as a child in a belief that she can communicate with her dead sister. As an adult she works with the deaf, and a chance encounter with a young orphan deaf girl proceeds to change how she views life and interacts with people. The book offers a peek inside the culture of the deaf community and it is interwoven beautifully throughout the story. This is a short book that has a great impact. It examines the complexities of grief and mourning , family alienation, vulnerability, and opening oneself up to love. I would highly recommend this heartwarming book. "
-I Just Finished
A beautiful, slender novel about the Deaf commnity, written with elegance and compassion. I loved it, especially because it’s a debut novel!
- LitLovers Blog
This is Rachel Stolzman's debut novel and I can tell you right now that it surely will not be her last! I curled up on the sofa yesterday and read this wonderful book from cover to cover. The prologue sets the stage and has to be one of the best, most poignant prologues I have read in awhile. The story of Anna and Adrea is just so wonderfully done, the writing so heartfelt, almost poetic in style. The whole novel is just such a great testament to those who have loved and lost and loved again. I can't wait to see what the future holds for this author!
- Between the Bookendz
I read this book with a smile on my face and a lump in my throat nearly the entire way through. Then, when I was done, I returned to the front of the book and immediately re-read some of my favorite passages. My favorite parts centered around the character of Adrea and how she touched those around her. The stories of when Adrea's adoption certificate comes, Adrea finding the African violet plants at the market, Adrea getting dressed up for the poetry reading, and Adrea making her first cow-related sounds in France were charming and moving to read.
Further solidifying this short novel as a sheer pleasure to read was Stolzman's prose. Her background as a poet came through in her wonderful turns of phrases. From the beginning scenes that gripped you, as Anna watched her family frantically realize that her sister was drowning, the language of this book worms its way into your heart and mind.
- What Was I Reading?
