Ship Sooner
A Novel
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
Envision an imaginary dial with which you can turn all sounds from your everyday experience onto the highest level of volume: that is the world of 13–year old Ship Sooner whose incredible ability to hear sounds normally indiscernible to the human ear defines her life–"Carson McCullers meets Alice Hoffman" (Baltimore Sun).
Ship Sooner hears everyone and everything in her sleepy Massachusetts town. Sounds of frost forming on glass; a rabbit hopping on just fallen snow; and of a fork making indentations on pie crust are as familiar to Ship as an old Sinatra tune played full volume at the town diner. Misunderstood by her classmates and ignored by her disdainful older sister, thirteen–year old Ship consoles herself by listening to the sounds of others' secrets: her mother's lips pressing against those of a balding salesman's; her sister Helen's trysts in a secluded shed; family friend Trudy's breath quickening as she cuts the hair of the town priest; and her only friend Brian Dodd's promise to his parents not to tell where he goes with them on Sunday afternoons.
Ship's isolation intensifies when Brian disappears inexplicably the day after Christmas. During the long winter of 1981, as Helen retreats behind her slammed bedroom door and her mother is increasingly absent, Ship keeps a vigil for Brian and slowly loses hope. But as winter melts to spring, an unexpected calling from the woods will lead her to make an astonishing discovery that compels her to abandon all that she has known, and set out on a journey to transform her life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sheila "Ship" Sooner, a 13-year-old girl born with "exceptional hearing," can hear conversations whispered behind closed doors, the flutter of other people's eyelids and even the heartbeat of her best friend and neighbor, Brian Dodd. She wears ear caps to dampen the unbearable loudness of the world (smoke alarms and passing trains leave her howling in pain), removing the headphone-like device only to spy, along with Brian, on the citizens of 1970s Herringtown, Mass. But just because Ship hears everything doesn't mean the overinformed, socially awkward adolescent understands it. She feels singularly distant from her high-heel clad mother, Teresa, who is loving but preoccupied with petty gossip and men, and her older, cheerleader sister, Helen. When Teresa is called to care for a sick friend, her increasingly long absences, joined with Helen's cruelty and Brian's mysterious disappearance, leave Ship adrift. Ship's acute hearing causes her to make a startling discovery, and the rest of the novel follows her confused wanderings as she tries blindly to care for someone even more helpless than herself while she searches for Brian. Ship's misadventures are increasingly unlikely, but the compelling characters carefully developed in the first half not to mention the evocative descriptions of Ship's "miracle hearing" ("A lighter snaps open, then a flame licks up, followed by the burn, the hiss, and the singe of Trudy's cigarette") hold the reader's interest to the end.