Song for a Whale

Lynne Kelly's Song for a Whale is a quietly brilliant story for 9 year olds about a deaf girl who decides to send a song to a whale.

What happens

Iris is twelve and no other Deaf child goes to her school. She repairs antique radios for a shop and wears a knob off a 1950s Zenith on a chain round her neck.

In science one day her teacher plays a video about a whale called Blue 55. He sings at around fifty five hertz while other whales sing at thirty five and below, and he has been calling for years with nothing ever answering.

Iris stands up without noticing that she has stood up.

The book is narrated by Iris, and that is where all its power is. You sit inside her day. A teacher who says "tell Iris" to the interpreter instead of talking to her. A classmate who waves invented signs in her face. A lunch table where the conversation moves too fast to follow and everyone forgets to look at her.

You get her humour too, which is very dry. When a girl signs something incomprehensible at her, Iris asks her interpreter whether she has just called herself a giant squirrel.

There is one scene your reader will remember. Iris hands in a poem built from a sign language storytelling game she used to play with her grandad, a leaf blown off a tree and carried downstream into a bird's nest, the whole story told with one handshape. Her teacher puts a red line through it and writes that it does not rhyme. Iris writes underneath, in her own red pen, that it does to her.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that her grandad has died before the book starts and she is still right in the middle of missing him. She starts to text him about something she has found in a junkyard, remembers, and sends it anyway.

That is handled very gently. It is still grief, though, and it is on the page.

One other thing. Iris is twelve, and her worries are twelve year old worries, so this suits a confident reader who is happy to sit with something slower rather than somebody just finding their feet.

The whale sections are set in their own short chapters, written from his side, and they are lovely and sad in equal measure.

What lifts the whole thing is that Iris does not mope. She finds a problem, gets out her soldering iron, and starts working on it.

What to read next

If your reader wants another child working out how to be heard, Can You Feel the Noise? is in the library too. Sophie plays guitar in a band with her friends and wakes up one morning unable to hear anything at all.