Sly, surprising, and as fierce as its protagonists, Yaara Shehori's
Aquarium is a stunning debut that interrogates the practice of
storytelling--and storyhearing.
Sisters Lili and Dori Ackerman are deaf. Their parents--beautiful,
despondent Anna; fearsome and admired Alex--are deaf, too. Alex, a
scrap-metal collector and sometime prophet, opposes any attempt to
integrate with the hearing; to escape their destructive influence, the
girls are educated at home. Deafness is no disability, their father
says, but an alternative way of life, preferable by far to that of the
strident, hypocritical hearing.
Living in a universe of their own creation, feared by and disdainful of
the other children on their block, Lili and Dori grow up semi-feral.
Lili writes down everything that happens--just the facts. And Dori, the
reader, follows her older sister wherever she goes. United against a
hostile and alien world, the girls and their parents watch the hearing
like they would fish in an aquarium.
But when the hearing intrude and a devastating secret is revealed, the
cracks that begin to form in the sisters' world will have consequences
that span the rest of their lives. Separated from the family that
ingrained in them a sense of uniqueness and alienation, Lili and Dori
must relearn how to live, and how to tell their own stories.
