Review: "Mother Tongue" by Sara Nović

Mother Tongue by Sara Nović
Published May 2026 via Random House
★★★★

When Nović was a teenager, she started to lose her hearing. At first, panicked and in denial, she hid the loss, developing a robust set of tricks and tactics to pass. And then, eventually, she got herself into an ASL class and unlocked a whole new world.

I read Nović's Girl at War some years ago and loved it. (It's been almost a decade, and I still think about it sometimes. If you can stomach some intensity, go read it.) And then I read True Biz, Nović's novel set at a school for the deaf, and while it was of course written well, what has stuck with me from that is the sense that what Nović really wanted to do was write a nonfiction book about deafness and deaf culture. And, well, now we have Mother Tongue, which is partly a memoir but also partly a nonfiction book about deafness and deaf culture, and it clicked for me in a way that True Biz did not.

Don't go into this expecting a detailed memoir; some of this is Nović's own story, but she is careful about which parts of her own story (and her family's) she chooses to share. But in practical terms, this is fascinating. I'd say that I've spent more time thinking about deafness and deaf culture than the average hearing person, but at the end of the day it's still an experience that is fundamentally not mine, and there's still far more that I don't know than what I do know. I might know theoretically that people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing face discrimination, but I hadn't thought about the disconnect, for example, between the push for oral-only education for deaf children (in other words: force them to use only cochlear implants and hearing aids and lip-reading, and deny them ASL) and the enthusiasm for simple sign language for young hearing children. Or this, during the early days of the pandemic:

But as shelter-in-place orders continued to roll out across the country and deaf students at residential schools were sent home from their dorms, I heard from a friend—a hearing teacher at a deaf school—about the frantic calls they were fielding from parents: that their children were completely out of control, and they could not communicate with them. Almost none of the parents knew even basic ASL, with one woman contacting the school begging for someone to please video-chat her young child and explain that it was time to go to bed. (loc. 1424*)

I just cannot imagine. I've read enough about deafness and politics around deafness and so on and so forth to think that if I had a kid with hearing loss I'd skip the cochlear implants, tap into whatever deaf community I could find, and put us both into sign language classes pronto. And while I'm not in anybody else's head or life, and I'm not here to judge people I know nothing about, and I don't know how fluent I'd be able to get or in what time frame if I were in someone else's shoes, I just cannot imagine knowing that the best way to communicate with my kid was to learn another language and then not learning even the basics in that language. Maybe this is less about those parents itself, though, and more about what Nović talks about throughout the book: the way that society at large has pushed people with disabilities to the margins and refused to make room for them.

At times I might have liked more about Nović's story (making no assumptions here, but it was not lost on me that she says little about her parents' eventual understanding of her hearing loss), but also, I hold a firm belief that memoirs need not be tell-alls and should only share as much that is personal as the author is comfortable sharing, so I can't really fault the book for that. Overall an excellent and thought-provoking read.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.