True Biz

The term true biz is American Sign Language (ASL) slang that can be translated as: “seriously,” “literally,” “deadass,” “no kidding,” or “real talk.” The best coming-of-age tales are full of true biz, showing us young people grappling with their identities, ambitions, and communities. This messy work often involves many missteps and mistakes as characters journey into the biggest questions of life. The most compelling novels don’t shy away from this mess; if anything, they embrace it and its many lessons. Sara Nović’s remarkable new novel, aptly titled True Biz, is a masterful and unique addition to the coming-of-age canon chock-full of the titular stuff.

At the center of this novel is Charlie, a young deaf woman thrust as a HS junior into a boarding school for the deaf. She has a cochlear implant that frequently is on the fritz and causes her physical pain, and she lacks any signing fluency before her enrollment at River Valley School for the Deaf (RSVD). But with mentorship from February Waters, RSVD’s president (with plenty on her mind), and gradual support of her peers, Charlie slowly not only becomes a capable signer but becomes enmeshed in a vibrant world of deaf culture. As she moves further from fear and isolation into agency and curiosity, she explores all the classic pleasures and perils of adolescence: sex, politics, rock ‘n’ roll, and the eternal mysteries of Wikipedia. She is a remarkable character and a perfect companion to the reader on this journey into the past, present, and future of deaf life.

The riches of True Biz are too numerous to enumerate them all here. Suffice it to say that for me it contained welcome surprises on every page and some of the freshest writing I’ve encountered anywhere. From its explosive opening to its very last page, it is a delight. Run to it, fellow book lovers!

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history final, and have doctors, politicians, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever.

This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, cochlear implants and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.