Song for a Whale

The story’s protagonist, 12-year-old Iris Bailey, is a person who is profoundly Deaf and the daughter of two hearing parents. She has her mother’s thick dark curls and her father’s pale skin that freckles in the sun. Iris feels closest to her grandparents, who are Deaf, and enthusiastically engages in Deaf culture with them, using sign language and making handshape poems. As an ASL interpreter, it was important for Kelly to “write a character who would not wish to be ‘cured’ but is comfortable with her deafness” and learns how to express her need for a Deaf community who understands her (293).

Still, Kelly writes how before Iris attends Bridgewood, her experience as a Deaf child in a school made up of entirely hearing staff and pupils is far from atypical. Thus, many of Kelly’s readers who are Deaf may share Iris’s feelings of isolation and separation from her peers. Iris copes with her loneliness by throwing herself into her hobbies. By fixing electronics that others have given up as useless and composing a song to help Blue 55 feel less alone, Iris empathetically engages with lonely, neglected objects and creatures—and indirectly addresses her own loneliness. She never gives up on either an electronics repair project or reaching the whale, as she applies the determination and patience that she wishes people would have when they communicate with her.