True Biz

True Biz is Sara Novic's multi-POV novel set at River Valley School for the Deaf, a fictional boarding school facing closure just as its students are coming into their own.

Charlie arrives at River Valley mid-year, having grown up mainstreamed with a cochlear implant that never worked as promised, and now encountering American Sign Language and Deaf culture for the first time. Her classmates — including Austin, born into a multigenerational Deaf family, and February, the school's headmistress, quietly overwhelmed by a marriage strained by her husband's early-onset dementia and a state threatening to defund the school — carry their own overlapping stories.

Interspersed with brief primers on Deaf history, sign linguistics, and disability politics, the novel gives an inside view of a community often flattened from the outside: its arguments, its humor, its romances, and its fight to be heard on its own terms.