The Gift of the Girl Who Couldn't Hear - Hardcover

In Her Own Words...

"I grew up in a house full of stories.

"And one of the earliest family stories I remember comes from my father's crime reporter days. My parents were on their way to Cincinnati after their wedding on New Year's Day in 1937. It was night, and by the light from the car's headlights, my father spotted a brown paper bag in the middle of the road. He stopped the car. There was, he claimed in earnest, a baby in that paper bag.

"A baby?" my mother asked incredulously. "How do you know?"

"Look, for heaven's sake," he said to her, as though her sense of sight had failed her. "Can't you tell?"

"She looked. She could see the paper bag perfectly by the headlights. It appeared to be a brown paper bag that gave no evidence of concealing a baby. But it did move, she noticed, as my father rushed to rescue it from the road.

"Filled with a sudden excitement, she began to believe that he was right and would return with a small baby which he'd dump from the paper bag onto her lap. She straightened her skirt in anticipation.

"Well," she asked as he opened the door by the driver's seat. "What is it?"

"My father got in, tossed the paper bag in the back seat, and turned on the engine.

"Nothing," he said and drove off into the night with his new bride, heading for Cincinnati.

"Why did you think there was a baby in the paper bag?" my mother dared to ask sometime later.

"There could have been a baby," my father said simply.

"Anything of course is possible, and so my reasonable mother agreed that yes, there could have been a baby.

"Besides," my father later said. I couldn't imagine that it was simply an empty paper bag."

"I loved being around the house when my father came home from work so I wouldn't miss my role in whatever high drama might be played out in our kitchen. It wasn't so much that he told us stories, although he did that, too, but he made our lives into stories. I grew up believing that there could be a baby in an empty paper bag.

"I write the kind of books I liked to read as a childstories that could happen, often with a rebellious hero because that's the sort of child I was. They are family stories because my family is the center of my life. Even now with children almost grown, the house is usually full of them or their visiting friends, three dogs, two cats, and a certain disorder which I loved to read about in the big family books I read as a child. Most of my children's stories have a basis in truth. The Gift of the Girt Who Couldn't Hear is based on the friendship between my daughter Elizabeth and Karena Levy, who is deaf. Wait for Me is the cry I remember for years from my youngest child, Kate. My mysteries Lucy Forever and Miss Rosetree, Shrinks and Lucy Forever, Miss Rosetree, and the Stolen Baby are about two little girls who invent a psychiatric practice based on a game Elizabeth used to play with her friEND

Christina. I wrote a book called Family Secrets with my son Porter and another book called The Flunking of joshua T. Bates about my son Caleb when he was held back in the third grade and then got himself promoted.

"Recently, I was looking through some of my old books and came upon a collection of opera stories that had been given to me one Christmas when I was small. On the last page of each opera, I had crossed out the sad finale in black ink, and over the print I had written, "And They All Lived Happily Ever After."

"I do not believe in false promises, but I do believe that in life as well as in books, we owe our children the promise of a future."

Grade 5-7-- Eliza Westfield, who had been a popular kid and a good student, reaches 13 and, in her own description, "overnight turns unpretty and unsmart and mean." Unsure of herself, she refuses to try out for the seventh grade musical, Annie, despite her vocal ability and a long-held dream of being chosen for the starring role in the annual presentation, the most important event in her Toledo, Ohio neighborhood. Her best friend Lucy, who is deaf, is eager for a part, and Eliza agrees to coach her. Lucy's courage, determination, and common sense are the keys that enable Eliza to rediscover her personal resources and attain a measure of self-acceptance. Shreve gives readers a character who happens to be handicapped, but wants the same things that her peers want. The dynamics of schoolmate interaction--girl/girl rivalries, cliques, and awakening interest in the opposite sex--are believably captured. Adults here are, generally, multidimensional and positive figures. This story of a strong and honest friendship between young teen girls has many shining moments. It gives new respectability to that much maligned expression "heart-warming." --Libby K. White, Schenectady County Public Library, NY
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