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.
A student new to River Valley and to ASL, after growing up isolated with a malfunctioning cochlear implant.
The school's hearing, Deaf-raised headmistress, fighting to keep River Valley open.
A student from a multigenerational Deaf family who befriends Charlie.
The novel integrates educational excerpts, including Wikipedia-style entries and diagrams, to provide context on American Sign Language grammar and the history of the Deaf community.
The novel is being developed for television with actress Millicent Simmonds attached to star and serve as an executive producer.