And I’m not the only reader who felt that way. The only thing that kept me from giving this novel a full 5 stars was the ending, which felt incomplete and unresolved. 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. 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. Both felt truer to life than the way dialogue is traditionally written. And dialogue that is signed appears in italics. Speech appears without quotation marks and often without dialogue tags. Lastly, I like how the dialogue is written throughout the novel. 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). What I enjoyed most about True Biz was the richness and complexity of every character, even the side characters. My overall rating for this novel is 4.5 out of 5 stars. Reading this novel took me about two weeks, and I enjoyed every page.
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