Signs of Attraction is about two college students who have very different histories and experiences with hearing loss. When Reed notices Carli struggling in class, he befriends her and introduces her to his Deaf friends. Carli and Reed quickly become a couple, but Carli’s struggles to accept her hearing loss might undo everything.

The main characters have not only different levels of hearing loss but also different family histories and means of coping. Reed is Deaf, meaning that he cannot hear even with hearing aids. He feels abandoned by his birthparents, but he was raised by loving and accepting adoptive parents. Reed has a lot of angst about his birth parents and the recent death of his adoptive father, but he clearly has a good emotional foundation to fall back on, and his mother remains unfailingly supportive. Reed is totally upfront about being Deaf, has surrounded himself with supportive Deaf friends, and is extremely successful at school and as a teacher.

Carli can hear with the use of hearing aids, but not very well (Reed and his friends refer to this as “Hard of Hearing”). She grew up in an abusive household in which she was taught that her hearing loss was a flaw to be hidden. She’s spent her life being so busy denying and concealing her hearing loss that she hasn’t availed herself of the tools around her, like closed captioning. She doesn’t even know these tools exist. Carli is in denial about her family and about her hearing loss, and in the course of confronting these issues she moves through a lot of stages of grief, not always gracefully.

This book features a character struggling with ideas about disability that bug the shit out of me (among other things, when her hearing loss worsens, Carli worries about being unworthy and worries that she’ll never be able to have a successful life). The reason that these ideas worked in the context of this story is that these ideas were not presented as accurate perceptions of the world – they were portrayed as being part of a process that Carli has to go through on her way to a better state of mind. She has to pass through these stages in order to confront her family’s painful history and in order to confront her hearing loss, lose the shame and self-pity and self-loathing, and realize how much she has to offer the world.

In contrast, Reed is clearly portrayed as someone who is confident, who adapts to his hearing loss by being open about it and being resourceful and creative in working around it, and who has an enormous amount to offer in terms of his relationships with other people and his career, which is teaching deaf children. He provides a contrast for the reader and a guide for Carli.

I found this book to be tough reading because of the high level of angst, but I thought that for the most part (how could someone not know about closed captioning?) it was very realistic in showing Carli’s insecurities and sense of shame, and her journey to acceptance and a more creative, resourceful, and confident approach to her life. The book contains discussions about suicide and abuse, and also contains a scene of abuse that is quite graphic, so be prepared.

I was much more interested in Carli’s ability to cope with hearing loss than in the actual romance. Reed is a little older than Carli and he’s her mentor in this new world of Deaf acceptance and accessibility. So even though their relationship is nurturing and sweet, it also seemed slightly uncomfortable. Unlike a teacher, Reed does not have the kind of power over Carli that would make the relationship unethical, but I still worried about the imbalance in the relationship between the one who guides (Reed) and the one who is guided. Usually I dislike epilogues, but I think this book needed one so that we could see the couple relate a few years later, when Carli is less reliant on Reed. As it was, I was never invested in the romance itself even though I was invested in the overall arcs of the characters.

My most serious problem with the book involves Reed’s back-story. Initially, Reed is nervous about starting a relationship with Carli. His friends end up telling Carli that Reed is nervous because the last woman that he dated falsely claimed that he raped her, although she backed down on the claim almost immediately.

Not only does this reinforce inaccurate and damaging stereotypes about women falsely reporting rape, it’s not even necessary to the story. It adds a level of distrust between Reed and Carli because Reed is afraid of being betrayed again, but they already have plenty of problems and plenty of angst. The extra level of conflict is unnecessary. It adds to Reed’s fears about being perceived as broken, but the story already established those fears because of his birth parents. If it does anything, it makes Reed, who otherwise seems like a pretty OK guy, seem like the kind of sexist asshole who thinks that all women are the same, so that if one woman treats him badly he can’t trust any other women. It’s tasteless and gratuitous and I’m knocking the book down a whole grade for it (from B+ to C+).

I was so sad to see this element thrown into a story that was otherwise so positive. I loved the fact that hearing loss was not presented as a uniform thing, but rather something that would affect every individual differently (in addition to Reed and Carli, we meet Reed’s friends who also have various degrees of hearing loss). However, I did feel that this story needed one more round of editing – between Reed’s back-story with the evil girlfriend, and Reed’s adoption issues, and Reed’s dad’s death, and Carli’s issues, there was a lot of emotional stuff going on and these storylines tended to suddenly drop out of sight to make way for the next round of angst. At its best, this was a good story about thriving with hearing loss.