Miss-Delectable
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The sign of a gripping novel
The K Handshape
By Maureen Jennings
Dundurn, $22.95
It takes a lot to get Maureen Jennings fired up, which would seem counterintuitive for one of Canada's most popular crime novelists.
But Jennings, the very model of gentility and warmth, does get agitated while explaining what drove her to throw her bestselling new protagonist, Christine Morris, in at the deep end of deaf culture in only her second major case, The K Handshape.
Jennings, whose seven-part Victorian Toronto murder series, the
Murdoch Mysteries, migrated successfully from print to small screen across the country last January, says one controversial aspect of deaf culture drove her to redevelop the plot for her latest book, and get it off her chest.
What incensed the Toronto author so much ("and it really made me hot under the collar") was the publicized case of a deaf woman who, for political reasons, conceived a child with a deaf man in order to produce a deaf child.
The controversial case lead Jennings into the heart of North America's deaf culture, a culture the pregnant and profoundly deaf woman at the centre of the real-life story claimed had been marginalized.
To better understand the handicap and help shed more light on it through mystery, the author also signed up for sign-language classes.
"I felt angry about this deliberate engineering of a handicapped child for your own purposes," Jennings says. But after considerable research "I ended up not sympathizing exactly with the young woman but certainly understanding her position more.
"There is a deaf culture that deaf people have great pride in and a great loyalty to," the author discovered.
So she handed over a variation of the case to her character, Det.-Sgt. Morris, a forensic profiler with the Ontario Provincial Police. What sprang from that is a remarkably poignant story about the murder of a young deaf woman who was trying to break down discriminatory barriers for the hearing impaired. The 25-year-old victim is the daughter of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Leo Forgach, a co-worker of Morris.
We learn that hate mail the woman received before her watery death in Lake Couchiching probably had a lot to do with her death. She won few friends after it become known she had deliberately conceived a child with a congenitally hearing-impaired man. Detractors paid little heed to her complaints of "centuries of discrimination from the hearing world."
"We are not dumb; we are as capable of raising children as a hearing person is," the woman had proclaimed, just as in Jennings's real-life example. "Deaf culture is just as good as any other, if not better."
The K Handshape
By Maureen Jennings
Dundurn, $22.95
It takes a lot to get Maureen Jennings fired up, which would seem counterintuitive for one of Canada's most popular crime novelists.
But Jennings, the very model of gentility and warmth, does get agitated while explaining what drove her to throw her bestselling new protagonist, Christine Morris, in at the deep end of deaf culture in only her second major case, The K Handshape.
Jennings, whose seven-part Victorian Toronto murder series, the
Murdoch Mysteries, migrated successfully from print to small screen across the country last January, says one controversial aspect of deaf culture drove her to redevelop the plot for her latest book, and get it off her chest.
What incensed the Toronto author so much ("and it really made me hot under the collar") was the publicized case of a deaf woman who, for political reasons, conceived a child with a deaf man in order to produce a deaf child.
The controversial case lead Jennings into the heart of North America's deaf culture, a culture the pregnant and profoundly deaf woman at the centre of the real-life story claimed had been marginalized.
To better understand the handicap and help shed more light on it through mystery, the author also signed up for sign-language classes.
"I felt angry about this deliberate engineering of a handicapped child for your own purposes," Jennings says. But after considerable research "I ended up not sympathizing exactly with the young woman but certainly understanding her position more.
"There is a deaf culture that deaf people have great pride in and a great loyalty to," the author discovered.
So she handed over a variation of the case to her character, Det.-Sgt. Morris, a forensic profiler with the Ontario Provincial Police. What sprang from that is a remarkably poignant story about the murder of a young deaf woman who was trying to break down discriminatory barriers for the hearing impaired. The 25-year-old victim is the daughter of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Leo Forgach, a co-worker of Morris.
We learn that hate mail the woman received before her watery death in Lake Couchiching probably had a lot to do with her death. She won few friends after it become known she had deliberately conceived a child with a congenitally hearing-impaired man. Detractors paid little heed to her complaints of "centuries of discrimination from the hearing world."
"We are not dumb; we are as capable of raising children as a hearing person is," the woman had proclaimed, just as in Jennings's real-life example. "Deaf culture is just as good as any other, if not better."