Black Blizzard

10 hrs. 38 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Alison Stein

Narrator Elena Delver

Description

Teа’s father, dreaming of starting over with a clean slate, takes the family to the Bloodless Valley in the south of Colorado. But hope quickly melts away: rivers become shallow, crops fail, and black blizzards rise over the land again. For Tea, this time is like a standstill—she cannot attend school, take books from the library, or even keep in touch with friends from her past life.

To help the family survive, Tea gets a job at a local café, where she meets a deaf Ray. Tea has been hearing-impaired since birth, but her parents had demanded her whole life to hide it and pretend to have “normal” hearing. Ray, however, secretly introduces her to sign language—and with it, Tea first finds what she had been missing so badly: a way to speak truly, a sense of belonging to a community, and perhaps hope for closeness and love.

“Black Blizzard” is a tense yet very subtle coming-of-age novel about a hearing-impaired teenager who begins to rethink her ideas about family, feelings, and her own future.