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A Quiet Kind of Thunder

Sara Barnard

Start date: September 3, 2018

Finish date: September 29, 2018

Discussion: Monthly Bonus Reads

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What Members Thought

Feb 15, 2017 Puck rated it really liked it

Shelves: contemporary, cover-love, young-adult, romance, mental-health

An adorable contemporary romance, with sweet characters and great accurate representation of anxiety and being deaf.

“Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me.”

This book is the story of Steffi and Rhys, two teenagers who both find it hard to live in the normal world. Steffi has selective mutism c An adorable contemporary romance, with sweet characters and great accurate representation of anxiety and being deaf.

“Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me.”

This book is the story of Steffi and Rhys, two teenagers who both find it hard to live in the normal world. Steffi has selective mutism combined with severe social anxiety, meaning that she finds it extremely difficult to talk to people and rather uses BSL (British Sign Language). Rhys is the new kid on Steffi’s high school and is deaf, and when the headmaster introduces him to her because she knows BLS, Steffi and Rhys slowly grow from strangers to friends to something more.

So while the romance is a big part of the book, A Quiet Kind of Thunder is about much more than that. Apart from entertaining the reader, this story also educates us about sensitive topics like selective mutism, (social) anxiety, BLS, and the daily difficulties that the hearing impaired face. It is told from the first-person perspective of Steffi, which was lovely because Steffi’s struggle with her social anxiety was so realistically portrayed: as a person who also has undergone therapy to deal with severe stress, I completely understand what she was going through.

I shake my head. “Panic attacks aren’t supposed to happen.” I say. “I’m on medication. I’m happy. They are meant to go away now.”
“Steffi,” Jane [the therapist] says, still gentle, still calm. “You know that’s not how it works.”
“Why not?”
“Because anxiety doesn’t care if you’re happy or not. And if you tell yourself that you’re not allowed to have panic attacks because you’re ‘meant to be happy’, it will only make you feel worse.”

But it’s not all heaviness in this novel. Despite their disabilities, Steffi and Rhys still do normal teenage things together like go to parties, watch movies (with subtitles), and go on trips to Edinburgh. The story is also remarkably sexually positive and the author promotes safe sex in a very honest way that I haven’t read before. Steffi’s strong relationship with her best friend September (Steftember!) is amazing and very important to both of them, and there is plenty of cultural diversity in this novel as well: September is a black girl and Rhys is biracial (his father is from Guyana).

As for criticism, I would have prefered a dual-perspective so I would understand Rhys and his problems better. Now the focus is mostly on Steffi’s troubles and Rhys falls a bit behind. The second half of the book was also a little more tropy that the first half – including a life-changing journey a la “TFIOS” – but Steffi and Rhys definitely are more than their disabilities and love certainly doesn’t 'fix' any of their problems.

So not only has Sara Barnard written a wonderful love-story, it's also a very well-researched book about mental-health, BLS, being deaf, and the important support of friends and family while dealing with those issues. As an contemporary novel, “A Quiet Kind of Thunder” stands out in its diversity, dynamic characters, and well-build up romance, so it is a book that I would definitely recommend to others.

“Sometimes I don’t feel strong enough for this world.”
“Neither do I,” I say. “But we can be soft together.”
...more

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