Review: True Biz

True Biz by Sara Nović is set in the struggling industrial town of Colson, Ohio, and focuses on a cast of characters all connected to River Valley School for the Deaf. These characters include Head Mistress February Waters and her wife, Mel, and three students: Charlie Serrano, the new girl transferring to River Valley from the local mainstream school; Austin Workman-Bayard, a local deaf legacy student; and his mysterious roommate Eliot Quinn.

The novel opens with February giving a press conference explaining that the students are unaccounted for and that any information on their whereabouts should be reported to the Colson County Sheriff's Department. After the opening chapter, we are transported back in time to six months earlier when Charlie first transfers to River Valley, and the novel's action begins.

Reading this novel took me about two weeks, and I enjoyed every page.

My overall rating for this novel is 4.5 out of 5 stars. What I enjoyed most about True Biz was the richness and complexity of every character, even the side characters. I also learned a lot from the interactions between the characters as well as the inserted Wikipedia articles and curriculum excerpts from both the community ASL class Charlie takes with her dad and the death cultures class that February teaches (illustrations by Brittany Castle). Lastly, I like how the dialogue is written throughout the novel. Speech appears without quotation marks and often without dialogue tags. And dialogue that is signed appears in italics. Both felt truer to life than the way dialogue is traditionally written.

Nović manages to capture the nuances of each family's complicated relationships from February, who's caring for her elderly mother, to Austin, whose baby sister is born hearing, to Charlie, whose parents are recently divorced and struggling to co-parent. I also found it interesting that Austin’s storyline felt very similar to a short story Novic published in 2015 titled “Things Unspoken,” which was also really good.

The only thing that kept me from giving this novel a full 5 stars was the ending, which felt incomplete and unresolved. And I’m not the only reader who felt that way. Other readers have asked about the ending and the possibility of a sequel, to which Novic has generously written a response. Bottom line: There will be no sequel, and the conclusion of the novel was intentionally open-ended. In all, I loved this novel, and I would highly recommend it to all mature readers out there (16-years-old+).