annebennett1957's review against another edition
4.0
Take a occult-obsessed teenager who is hearing impaired with brittle bone disease. Add in a set of quirky friends, a dead friend who seems to still be around, tarot cards, magic books, weird parents, and problems with the friends of the library and you have a small idea how different this book is than anything you've ever read before.
kricketa's review against another edition
1.0
i don't have enough interest in tarot or the occult to stay awake whenever portman strays from the current storyline, which is every other sentence. i really did want to find out more about andromeda and daisy, but there was too much muck to wade though.
leigh_ann_15_deaf's review against another edition
4.0
Andromeda is a high school junior who loves the occult. She has osteogenesis imperfecta that caused bone malformations (which she refers to as her "defective ears"), hence a “mild” conductive deafness. This was published before 3D printing of the ossicles, so she references an expensive procedure that replaces cartilage with steel implants (stapendectomy) which she would consider. So Portman is showing off his knowledge here.
Andromeda constantly mishears things. Some are very realistic (“wicker” instead of “wicca,” and “reading” instead of “weeding,” but others are less so—confusing “freak,” “geek,” and “weak,” as well as “reading” and “bleeding,” are much stranger because they are more easily discernible through speechreading, which I assume Andromeda does due to the repeated mentions of her lack of eye contact with others).
One annoyance: when someone mispronounces something, it supposedly “cuts out the middleman” so she hears it as it is spoken, rather than warped as correctly pronounced words are. So when someone says “mageek” to her, that is what she hears, whereas if they had said “magic” she would have heard something else. That’s not how mishearing things works. If someone mispronounces something, it’s even harder for a deaf person to parse out what they meant.
Andromeda has a habit of saying “What?” even as she processes what’s been said and responds before any repetition. People who know her don’t repeat right away anymore.
Portman does well with keeping her deafness straight. That is, she has trouble with higher frequencies, and Portman keeps that consistent. Andromeda’s ears tend to filter out speech sounds but pick up background noise well (lower frequencies). She doesn’t hear distant sirens responding to a fire, reinforcing she has more trouble with higher frequencies.
She also frequently experiences tinnitus, which is very accurate to the deaf experience in general. With her conductive deafness, she would more likely have pulsatile tinnitus.
Something I find very interesting: When Andromeda mishears something, she will inform the reader that the speaker “meant” (not “actually said”) the actual words they used. (E.g., “Are you hiding camels in there?” She meant “lighting candles.”) But she often goes on to use the misheard phrase in the narrated text, playfully adopting it into her own vocabulary. For example, when she misheard “wicca” as “wicker,” she continued to muse about the former while using the latter, occasionally crossing over the two (a worship of furniture).
Again, though, some of these mishearings are contrived: “warnings about unintended camels burning down sickle family gnomes and how interns won’t cover chairlessness and negligees faded out.” (warnings about unattended candles burning down several(?) family homes and how insurance won’t cover carelessness and negligence faded out). Mom probably didn’t pronounce negligence with an “ay” sound as in negligees, and if Andromeda can’t hear higher frequencies she wouldn’t have assumed something like “chair” instead of “care,” given the context of the warnings come right after she’s accused of having lit candles in her room. So Portman is definitely exaggerating a lot of what Andromeda mishears for comedic effect.
I’m not too upset by the occasional taking it too far (whole strings of nonsense out of context as opposed to a few words here and there that she has to guess/figure out), as it’s generally well incorporated. But it does get annoying as a deaf reader because now I have to work extra hard to figure out what she's "mishearing."
I think the weakest aspect of Portman's portrayal of deafness has to do with music.
Andromeda struggles to use earbuds due to her ear shape, and the volume doesn’t go loud enough for her to make out more than chaos and a few lyrics here and there. Mostly just “a growling man with a loud clatter in the background.” This is realistic. But later she is able to understand the lyrics of one song, which are spoken in a reverberant, computerized voice, and recognize it as an almost verbatim list of instructions from an old ritual. This is less realistic.
She listens to a lot of music, and seems to be able to make out everything just fine, even hearing slithering noises (which would presumably be out of her hearing range?). Not sure if this is inconsistency or if old cassette players have a higher volume than CD players. (In the film Sixth Sense, Malcolm turns up the volume enough to hear a ghost’s voice, but I don’t know if that’s a supernatural thing or if cassette players actually go up that high.) Later Byron tells her it’s Led Zeppelin singing, not a woman, so maybe she’s just got the Lady Montegreen effect. Like when we were kids my brother thought Godsmack was singing “I, ravioli” instead of “I stand alone.” (He really loved ravioli.)
I wish it was clearer to the reader what exactly was going on with her music-listening.
At the end, it turns out a big reason for her deafness is buildup, as her ears are oddly shaped and difficult to clean. The doctor cleans her ears and she can hear much more than before—seemingly everything—and is hyperaware of sound for a bit. I don’t really like that this comes at the very end, as it comes across as magic cure. It’s just that we have a “happy ending” and the curing of her hearing plays a part of that happiness/hopefulness. As though if she hadn’t gotten her ears cleaned she would have been less happy somehow. I don't know.
Deaf reader reviewing books with deaf characters. This book is listed on my ranked list of books with deaf characters: https://slacowan.com/2023/01/14/ranked-deaf-characters-in-fiction.
whichcraftidk's review against another edition
4.0
Not my usual thing. But I looked for books about tarot cards in my library's e-book collection and this came up. Some reviews say this read like a course on tarot. It kind of is, but not for the full deck. Thank goodness. The book was long enough just focusing on a few cards. I prefer to learn from fiction so I shouldn't pretend like I wouldn't eat up a series that covered all the cards.
Tarot learning aside, I enjoyed this. Andromeda starts off stuck in her past and slowly moves beyond it. She's awkward, nervous, anxious, and avoiding dealing with problems at home. She's flawed but relatable and likable. It was rough being in her head at first, but eventually her way of hearing and thinking clicked.
Tarot learning aside, I enjoyed this. Andromeda starts off stuck in her past and slowly moves beyond it. She's awkward, nervous, anxious, and avoiding dealing with problems at home. She's flawed but relatable and likable. It was rough being in her head at first, but eventually her way of hearing and thinking clicked.
kather21's review against another edition
3.0
Slow start eventually snowballs into a bizarrely entertaining ending.
librarianna81's review against another edition
2.0
Bah. Pretty disappointed in Dr. Frank, I have to say. The book frustrated me much of the time. I barely got past the first 10 pages, which were densely packed with information that *might* have been interesting to those who practice the Tarot, but probably not. (I had been planning on passing this on to my friends who are interested in that sort of stuff, but I'm going to spare them.) I didn't continue picking up the book because I was interested, I kept picking it up because I couldn't wait to be done with it. That's not a good thing. I kind of like AK as a character, and I liked the development of the relationships, but I felt like the novel ended WAY too abruptly, and left me with too many questions still very unanswered. And not even questions which were messy and related to the magic stuff, either. Things like what in the universe was the connection between the Toad Bones spell and Choronozon and the Old Folks' Home?!?
I did, like I said, find Andromeda endearing and I rooted for her, so that was a good sign - Portman did well with that part. I just had such high hopes for this book after King Dork, and was unfortunately severely disappointed. Bummer.
I did, like I said, find Andromeda endearing and I rooted for her, so that was a good sign - Portman did well with that part. I just had such high hopes for this book after King Dork, and was unfortunately severely disappointed. Bummer.
scamp1234's review against another edition
Loved King Dork, just couldn't embrace this one as much. Took me awhile to finish this one. I'll be eagerly waiting for his next book still.
nerfherder86's review against another edition
4.0
Very funny and very weird--if you like tarot cards or anything "weejy" (that is, relating to ouija boards and the occult), then this is the book for you. It's a lighthearted book, though, it's not really about 'dark magic', just a lot about the tarot and the history of tarot. Andromeda is in high school, a bit of an outsider, has no real friends except Daisy--who's dead. But Andromeda thinks Daisy may be trying to contact her from the afterlife. Andromeda has a funny way of looking at the world, not only because she sees potential psychic signs, omens and "synchs" everywhere (don't call them coincidences!), and knows the indepth history of the occult and "magickal" world, but also because she's partially deaf, so she mishears a lot. And sometimes, rather than try to get the speaker to repeat the phrase, she just goes with the wrong words. So a bathroom becomes the "vacuum" or her mom's religious background is "Spinach U-turn" instead of "Finnish Lutheran," and her "sensitive" almost-boyfriend-who-dumped-her-via-text is "Saint Steve." She continues to use these words throughout the whole book--good thing there's a glossary at the back of the book, because it gets quite amusing and confusing! Andromeda also is dealing with The Mom and The Dad, her names for her eccentric parents; the bossy girl at school who is sort-of her friend; and her shelver job at the public library, where, to her horror, someone wants to get rid of all of her favorite books on magic and the occult! Well, Andromeda is not going to stand for that...if she can just find enough friends with library cards. Maybe the new boy she's met, who's into "thulu rock" music, might be able to help...
I love the library scenes, of course, being a librarian (and a former shelver), and Andromeda's geeky character, her sense of humor, and I definitely learned a lot about tarot from this book.
I love the library scenes, of course, being a librarian (and a former shelver), and Andromeda's geeky character, her sense of humor, and I definitely learned a lot about tarot from this book.