Give Me a Sign by Anna Sortino
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Give Me a Sign by Anna Sortino is not only a sweet coming of age story - it is also about finding your identity and fitting in within your own community. This book tells the story of Lilah, a Deaf teenager who has just obtained her first job as a junior counselor at Camp Gray Wolf, a camp for Deaf and Blind children. Lilah is concerned that her ASL skills may not be up to par, given that she grew up using hearing aids and her family does not sign. When Lilah gets to camp, she meets new friends including fellow counselor, Isaac, another Deaf teen. As Lilah joins her new Camp family, she learns to navigate her place in the Deaf Community.
The character of Lilah is very well-written and relatable. Her relationship with Isaac and the other counselors seemed realistic, the way real teenagers would talk and act. This book gives a lot of information about Deaf Culture, including accessibility and discrimination against people with disabilities. I loved this aspect of the book! More literature including characters with disabilities, please - especially by Own Voices authors! ( The author, Anna Sortino, is Deaf and attended a camp like the one described in the book). I highly recommend this book for teenagers and adults looking for a sweet coming of age story and one that will give you some insight into a world other than your own,.

Thanks to Penguin/G.P. Putnam’s Sons BYR for the ARC! I really enjoyed this look at blind and Deaf culture.

4.25 stars!

I really enjoyed this book. Lilah and the rest of the Gray Wolf Camp staff and campers were so much fun, and I loved getting to experience the camp from Lilah’s perspective who used to go to the camp as a previous camper, now she is a junior staff member.

Lilah truly grew so much in this story, and she found out who she was within the Deaf community. I love how we got to see the progression of her learning how to advocate for herself and others. I love how comfortable she became at camp with or without her hearing aids, and coming to understanding that she is completely whole no matter how she decides to go about the world.

I didn’t know you could do alt-text options for posts, so I am now going to figure out how to do that to make my posts more accessible to others.

I loved the author’s note at the end where she explains that she had a similar experience to learning ASL at a camp. What a great book.

Give Me a Sign follows Lilah as she works as a counselor for a summer camp for deaf and blind kids. Throughout the story Lilah is struggling with determining her Deaf identity and whether she Is “deaf enough”. I found the character of Lilah to be well developed and I enjoyed seeing her perspective throughout the book. The author does well at developing the relationship between Lilah and the Isaac, the Deaf camp counselor she has a crush on, while also focusing on Lilah as an individual and her relationship with the other characters in the book. She was also able to explore the diversity of Deaf identities in a way which felt as though conversations which these characters would actually have. Overall, I think this is a good story for those who want to see a girl grow into her identity as a Deaf person while also having a summer camp romance.

Full of understanding of others’ differences and learning to be comfortable with yourself, the teens in this book were so likable. The story was a fun and very exciting read! I can’t wait to see what else Sortino can come out with!

This was such a cute and heartfelt coming of age story as well as a very cute summer romance between Lilah and Isaac. I've never read a book about Deaf and blind culture and I definitely will read more in the future. All of the side characters were great too. Everyone, hearing or Deaf, should read this book!

Thank you Netgalley for the arc!

Give Me a Sign was an absolute delight to read! More than anything, this book was very informative and provided such great insight into the deaf and hard of hearing community.

Lilah is a teenager who feels stuck. She doesn’t feel deaf enough to identify as Deaf, and she doesn’t hear well enough to meet everyday expectations. When she gets the opportunity to attend camp Gray Wolf, the same camp she attended when she was younger, as a counselor, she is excited for the opportunity. Lilah expects to learn more ASL and be part of a community that understands her better. What Lilah wasn’t expecting was meeting a super cute camp counselor who offers to help with her signing.

Read if you like:
🏕️Friends to Lovers
🏕️Summer Camp Vibes
🏕️Young Adult Books
🏕️Deaf Representation

I highly recommend this YA read, and I feel like we need more books with deaf representation. I found Give Me a Sign to be so valuable and hope you will check this one out for yourself!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you Penguin Teen for providing me with a #gifted copy!

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**Posted on Instagram (full review) on July 11, 2023: http://www.instagram.com/nobookmark_noproblem
**Posted on Instagram (mini review) early July, 2023: http://www.instagram.com/nobookmark_noproblem
**Posted on Amazon on July 11, 2023
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Thank you so much for the e-arc!💖

This book is the most beautiful, cute and wholesome thing I have read in a long time🥹. For some time I had been eyeing this book and when I was approved by the arc I was the happiest in the world🤭.

In this book we meet Lilah, who has decided to go to a Summer Camp as a Junior Counselor. And during this time we see how she finds her community, how she learns to accept herself as she is, how society really is and obviously, to fall in love with the sweetest boy ever🥰.

I made the last 30% of this book as long as I could because I didn't want to say goodbye to such unique and sweet characters🥹. I really enjoyed this book very much and it is perfect for hearing people to understand how difficult it is for the deaf.

The book is very wholesome and cute, but personally the situation that occurs near the end of the book had me crying like a baby🫣😭. (Isaac ilysm <3)

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I thought this story was super cute and fun! The representation was so so needed and refreshing too! It was even educational, I learned a lot about deaf culture. Something about the plot just felt a little boring at times though. I still think it’s a great premise!

I received a digital ARC of this novel from Penguin Young Readers Group through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

This novel follows Lilah and other campers as they attend Camp Gray Wolf, a fictional camp for the deaf and blind. I learned a lot from the story, and related to each character. This book is geared towards a Young Adult audience, but I believe that anyone will enjoy it. Especially readers who appreciate disability representation in novels. The author of the novel is Deaf, and does a fantastic job of making the point that everyone has the right to make their own choices.

"...that’s why a place like camp is so important— people can find their own Deaf identities.”
I've never been to a camp, this book made me nostalgic to the summers I could have had.
I love sign language, and I wish there were more books like this with deaf, HoH and blind representation, because this story is important, there's a sweet storyline with a strong message and unique style of writing made the book even more special. I think sign language should be mandatory for everyone, I want to learn it too, years ago I watched "switched at birth" where there's several deaf and hard of hearing actors playing characters who use sign language, I started learning alphabet and some basic words, I really want to continue learning.
I'm grateful for an early ARC for this amazing book, it's perfect for summer and I will recommend it to everyone despite their tastes in books.

I love seeing books with great representations of Deaf culture. Lilah feels like she is stuck between two worlds, the Deaf and hearing worlds. But when she becomes a camp counselor at a camp for the Deaf and Blind, she begins to discover where she truly belongs. This book provides great insight into Deaf culture and is a sweet read!

I struggled with this book. It felt as though it was a first draft. And while the plot and the idea of the book was good, the pace was off, and it had a few other problems. The biggest one being it was clear the author is either not hard of hearing, or hasn't talked to anyone in the deaf community. And perhaps it is simply the deaf community that I am near that they don't say stuff like "Hearies".
You can see the author tried, and I absolutely loved the idea of this book, but I feel it needs a lot more work before it is ready for publication. This is why I am giving it a one star review.

I adore books that teach me things & have good representation. This one had dead & hard of hearing representation. This YA debut did a great job of being the nostalgia of summer camp while educating us on how we can be more accommodating to the deaf community. I enjoyed seeing Lilah get more comfortable in her skin, and with ASL (not something her family knows). There was a cute summer romance intertwined too. I liked the perspectives in the book. There were people who’s whole families are deaf, there are some who are hard of hearing with hearing parents who use hearing aids and/or cochlear implants. The knowledge that being deaf doesn’t mean you’ve “lost” something, and that if you love someone, you can learn ASL to communicate.

I really enjoyed and can’t wait for this to come out! Thank you NetGalley for eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Lilah feels somewhere in between. She doesn’t feel “deaf enough” to identify as Deaf but not “hearing enough” to meet the world’s expectations.

She takes a summer job as a junior counselor at a deaf and blind camp that she attended when she was younger in the hopes of gaining more proficiency in ASL. There she meets an eclectic group of peers including a couple of possible love interests and also learns some lessons the hard way, both personally and as a counselor.

To be honest, I wanted to like this one more than I did. The writing was fine, and there were some good points made about how insensitive and uncompromising those outside the deaf world can be. However, I felt there should have also been more of a balance of those “outsiders” who do strive for equality and inclusion with the deaf community. I also felt Lilah a bit too scattered, but at 17 I can give her a pass on that…mostly.

But I’ll also say that I’m not within this intended readership’s age so I’m probably not the best reader to judge this particular book.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group/G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers for providing the free early arc of Give Me a Sign for review. The opinions are strictly my own.

I wanted to like this book so bad, but the writing felt very very juvenile. I think this type of representation is important, but this book wasn't for me.

I did not finish this book!

2.5 ⭐

The theme is good but I felt that there's so many characters and sometimes confused me. So this book wasn't for me.

I knew this text dealt with people with varying degrees of hearing loss & I was intrigued to read about the camp experience from that perspective. I have a cousin who was born without the ability to hear, so I thought I had a decent understanding of some of his challenges. I definitely overestimated my understanding. This book opened my eyes, so I’m sure that it will do the same for students. I will say that while there are a few moments of intense action, much of the story moves slowly and is fairly understated. Kids looking for lots of drama may not be drawn to the text. Kids looking to (or willing to) consider life through the perspective of their peers will be drawn in by the characters & will come away with a more nuanced understanding of living with hearing challenges.

Lilah is in between in a lot of ways: she's hard of hearing, but doesn't feel "deaf enough" to identify as Deaf. Lilah is struggling in school, and makes a snap decision to apply for a job as a junior counselor at Camp Gray Wolf, a camp specifically for the deaf and blind, and one of the only places she felt like she fit in. She left to find community and finds a lot more than she bargained for.

I'm hard of hearing, so I definitely relate to Lilah's strategy of just smiling and saying "no thanks," even though it can lead to awkward (or in Lilah and Isaac's case dangerous) situations. I really enjoyed reading this and I love that it's an Own Voices novel. The romance was cute, the characters were interesting and very diverse, and the plot was both uplifting, educational, and fun. I'd love to see a return to camp or even a look into others' lives outside of Gray Wolf, particularly Simone and Bobby.

this book was SO good!
Lilah was such an incredible main character. i loved her growth journey and how much she came to accept and even love her hearing loss. i loved getting to learn some more about the deaf community, I took sign language in highschool and ever since this community has had such a special place in my heart so as soon as I saw this book I knew i had to read it asap. overall i absolutely adored this book and cannot wait to read more from this author.