Can You Feel The Thunder? - Softcover

National Geographic Learning, National Geographic Learning

4.08

40 ratings by Goodreads

9780736228039: Can You Feel The Thunder?

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0736228039 ISBN 13: 9780736228039

Publisher: National Geographic School Pub, 2005

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Mic Parson's friends an family make him feel confused a lot. How can Mic do his best with so many "weird" people around him

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About the Author:

Lynn E. McElfresh grew up in Urbana, Illinois, in the weirdest house on the block, where the windows were full of handprints after a thunderstorm.

Ms. McElfresh is a lifetime member of the Girl Scouts. In high school, she helped with a deaf Girl Scout troop that had fourteen deaf girls and two deaf-blind girls. That experience was the inspiration for Can You Feel the Thunder?

Ms. McElfresh currently lives in Decatur, Illinois, with her husband, two children, and their cocker spaniel.

From Booklist:

Seventh-grader Mic's older sister, Stephanie, is deaf and blind, and he's become acutely sensitive to the funny sounds she makes, how sloppily she eats, and how much of the family's attention seems to go to her. When his school lunch table is invaded by a new kid, whom Mic dubs Nerd Boy, he feels put upon indeed. Nerd Boy, whose name is Vern, walks and eats funny, but he can really pitch. There isn't going to be any baseball for Mic unless he can master the mathematical fractions. Although he resents having to slap braille labels on the soda cans for Stephanie or spell the long Sunday sermons into her hand, Mic does grow enough to grasp how Stephanie's irrepressible spirit fills his life: "to her, the world was a giant toy." It's a little too pat that Stephanie is the one who finally makes fractions clear to Mic, and Mic's showing Vern's family how Stephanie feels thunder with her hand against the windowpane is a bit too easy an epiphany. However, the climactic baseball game, with Vern pitching and Mic's winning run, will probably leave readers all teary. This first novel is straightforward about the messy daily cost of Stephanie's disabilities, and McElfresh is pitch-perfect on the odious combination of forced sweetness and guilty politeness that people are prone to use with disabled people and their families. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

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