Can You Feel the Noise?

Stewart Foster's moving story for 8 year olds about a girl in a school band who wakes up one morning unable to hear is Can You Feel the Noise?

What happens

Sophie is eleven and has just passed grade seven guitar. She's in a band with her best friend Mia and two boys from her year, Ty and Rocco. They're into the semi-finals of a Battle of the Bands, and the final is at the biggest music venue in town.

Her hearing has been getting worse for a while. Then one day in May a noise starts up inside her head. A hum, then a buzz, then a thousand bees in a jar. Nobody else can hear it and it won't stop.

Three days later she wakes up and it's quiet. Properly quiet. She claps her hands and hears nothing. She can't even hear herself crying.

What follows is Sophie trying to cope with a silent world. Hospital tests she hates. Lip-reading a doctor with a beard (not easy!). Messages from her friends she can't bring herself to answer. Her guitar standing untouched by the window.

Stewart Foster makes you feel it. The crisp packet that doesn't rustle. Words that turn into blanks as soon as someone looks away. The awful moment when her mum and the doctor start talking about her instead of to her, and she runs out. It's clever and very moving.

There's warmth everywhere too. Mum and Dad are lovely. Her annoying stepbrother starts turning up with Haribo. Rocco sends her a box of Maltesers with a finger-hole poked in it. And her music teacher writes to tell her about Beethoven.

This is an emotional read and it's good to know that going in. Sophie is frightened and angry and cries a lot, and a short scene at the very start shows her being wheeled down to an operating theatre. A child who's spent time in hospital, or who has a hearing loss of their own, may find it especially powerful. Could your reader imagine music they can feel but not hear?

What to read next

Stewart Foster also wrote The Bubble Boy, about an eleven-year-old boy who lives in a single hospital room, where every visitor has to wear overalls. It's in the library too.