Does disability live in the person or in the eye of the beholder? Does a wall exclude or protect? What defines me? Three questions for three women—grandmother, mother, daughter—whose lives unfold across the twentieth century in a novel that becomes far more than its plot. Rosa, Laura, and Francesca are all deaf. Beyond being family, they share this single fact. Yet the way each one lives it is so different that you almost forget it matters.
Not because deafness isn't at the heart of the story—the author has written that he came to it "because I lived it on my own skin from birth"—but because what the world names a deficit turns out to be something else entirely. Just one element of a person among many others. An element more or less burdensome, more or less pressing, depending on who you are, this braid of three women tells us, each with her own voice and her own answer.