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From TheYoungFolks.com's review by Leigh-Ann Brodber: For Simon, music is life. He’s the lead guitarist and vocalist in his band and life is looking good, until he wakes up and everything is eerily silent. Read more: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/...
Impossible Music was able to get to the emotional side of me. I felt Simon's anger and pain. Waking up and not being able to hear would be devastating. His connection to music made this point come across well.The going back and forth between a couple of months at a time felt off-putting. It just confused me and messed with my reading experience.The writing of Simon's emotions and his connection to music was well done however, I felt like the writing was also holding me back from loving this book...
I received this e-ARC via NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.I found myself enjoying this book far more than I expected to as someone who rarely picks up contemporary novels and knows next to nothing about how music is actually made. I thought the premise of Impossible Music sounded interesting and relatively unique, and I feel I was proven right in those respects.I have already seen many reviews criticizing Impossible Music for not being an Own Voices story, but I thin...
Okay - so first a caveat: I am aware and disappointed to discover this is not an ownvoices book. I thought for sure it must've been because it felt real, especially to me as a hearing musician very afraid of losing my ability to hear. For this reason, the book hit me right in the feels. However, I now know that this book has been written from the POV of a hearing person imagining what a recently Deaf person might feel so I'm not sure how genuine this journey would be for an actually Deaf person....
The last thing Simon Rain can remember hearing is the music blaring through his earphones as he fell asleep. That was nine months ago and after suffering from a stroke in the middle of the night while he slept, eighteen year old Simon hasn't heard a thing since. Coming to terms with his diagnosis has been a difficult journey for Simon. As a musician, music has been his life and an outlet to express himself creatively. Now angry and isolated, Simon refuses to learn Auslan, Australian Sign Languag...
The concept of IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC totally hooked me. I love books about angsty musicians, so I knew I’d like Simon. I like fierce female characters, so I suspected I’d like G and Simon’s little sister, Maeve, also stole my heart. She’s strong and sometimes pushy, but you really get the sense that underneath that is a lot of love for her family.In terms of the plot, this must have been a tough book to write. I felt like it dragged sometimes, but I don’t think that actually had to do with the pacing...
ARC provided by Netgalley and the publisher.Nope. Thumbs down.As a hearing impaired person, I am all for HOH/Deaf rep. I want it. I will read any and everything with a HOH/Deaf character in it. I will give pretty much anything the benefit of the doubt but most of the time, they stink. 1. This isn’t own voices. Which super bugs me because no matter how much research you do, or how many HOH/Deaf people you know ... you won’t ever get it right. 2.It focuses on a very, very rare form of hearing impa...
I was talking to some students at school about this book today, I told them the premise, that a young man who loves music, making it and performing it, loses his hearing overnight. He wakes up in the morning and is totally unable to hear. This book is about his adjustment and him trying to work around the tragedy that has befallen him. He goes to a group for young people, meets a girl who is also deaf and they begin to form a relationship. I could tell them no more. We agreed that this sounded j...
If music was your everything, what would you do if you suddenly went deaf? This is the question Sean Williams explores in his gritty, upfront novel, Impossible Music. Questions about family, relationships, facing the future and following your dreams, even when they seem impossible, are the focus of Impossible Music. With a realistic teen male narrator, this book is gripping and compelling.
Read full review here: https://bookishtreats.wordpress.com/2... Music can be transmitted through words. Not just music, but noise as well. If you find the right words and put them together, you will be able to hear a horse galloping through the green, windy mountain. Flowers dancing at the beat of the wind, bees buzzing from one bloom to the next. It is a beautiful thing to hear sounds through words, using past experiences and imagination as primary sources. I didn’t know, or maybe didn’t pay at...
Look, I just finished this and I still have NO idea what just happened. Everything just passed by my head and I barely can even recall the plot or anything. In fact, I was so lost that I thought Rain was another character instead of the main character's last name. Whatever you say I'm blaming the fact that the book starts in the middle of the story and I had to piece things together, something I don't necessarily enjoy doing. I thought this book would've been more about music but didn't expect t...
Impossible Music is about a young man, Simon Rain, who suffers a stroke and ultimately loses his hearing. This causes Simon to experience this self-loathing when it comes to being deaf—he resists therapy, learning Australian Sign Language called Auslan, and even different treatments that are suggested for his deafness. His #1 passion in life is music and the book follows his journey in discovering that music is a universal language that all people can related to—even HOH/Deaf culture. He realize...
Utterly brilliant story of a young musician who experiences a rare form of hearing loss & his journey toward understanding the hand he has been dealt. A longer review will appear on my blog, Kathryn's Inbox in early July 2019.
DNF page 130 (ish)It’s unfortunate but I just couldn’t get into it. Didn’t enjoy the characters.I picked it up because I really liked the idea but overall it just wasn’t for me.
*This book was read as part of Middle Grade Madness’ 2020 TBR Challenge*If there was ever a reason for me to stop reading in 2020 it would’ve been because of this terrible book. It took me almost an ENTIRE MONTH to sludge through it!THIS WAS 320 PAGES OF MUSIC-FILLED OBSESSION. WHY AM I SHOUTING? BECAUSE I’M ANNOYED. This was DULL. There was hardly any depth to this book at ALL. The one recurring idea was that Simon couldn’t hear music but does that mean he couldn’t make music anymore? And then
Ever since I heard about this book when it was first released last year, I wanted to read it. I was happy when I finally had the chance to read it and loved it. I was a little disappointed when I got to the end, not wanting the story to end.
I'm always hone in on books with disability rep because I feel it's way way underdone in YA! Impossible Music features a profoundly deaf teen. Simon is an ex-wannabe-rock-god who has a stroke and wakes up profoundly deaf (it's a very rare brain damage) and the story is basically him trying to reconcile his musician identity with being deaf. It's obviously very deeply about grief. He lost a huge part of himself and he's struggling...and you really really feel the depth and aching of that loss wit...
I have a lot of complicated feelings about this book. On the one hand, Williams's use of language is excellent. He crafts some beautiful poetry around the ideas of Deafness, loss, change, personal growth, anger, love, creativity, etc. Sometimes I would get lost in the words, words that sang off the page. On the other hand, the story was incredibly slow, and even though very little happened, it was difficult to follow.To start on that note, there was absolutely no reason for this story not to be
This book was received as an ARC from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's Book Group in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.This was such an inspiring story that it brought me to tears. The story behind Simon and G and how they are so musically talented suffering from this illness that costs them their gift of hearing and still strive for their dreams. This is a story that teaches adversity, hardship, struggle and perseverance that...
So it would appear that this book touched a nerve. As many argue that the purpose of art is to both provoke thought (and just provoke), it would appear to have succeeded.My perspective as someone from the hearing community:1) I empathized HUGELY with Simon. As someone who spends insane amounts of time listening to, dissecting, analyzing and trying to dance to architecture (if you don't know what that means, Google "Frank Zappa dancing to architecture"), loss of my hearing would be a nightmare. I...