Chattering

Louise Stern's stories are peopled with brave young girls, out to party, travel the world, go a little bit wild. They communicate with the outside world via a complicated mixture of sign language, lip-reading, note-scribbling, guesswork and instinct. The one thing that marks them out from their peers is that they have grown up deaf.

It is this sense of dislocation from common experience that marks out Louise Stern's original voice. Yet they are full of daring, ready for adventures that take them into unfamiliar places and strange, cock-eyed relationships with people whose actions they observe but never wholly understand. She is fully engaged in the world we recognize and share, but the way she observes it sets her apart.

Her eyes are keen; she notices things we would never see; she is quick to judge, wary, suspicious and vulnerable. She experiences the world like a voyeur, always