John Egbert seeks to creatively help his Deaf community in a novel of pandemic-spread-by-terrorists plot, where historic abuses to the Deaf community, common misconceptions, and on-going failures in deaf education are revealed in a palatable way by wrapping the message in a thriller titled Mindfield. The disease quickly spreads from a small town in Montana to nearly thirty states, eventually affecting more than three million people. Egbert was the man behind the protest of AG Bell and the Deaf Bilingual Coalition. It is a story with a point tidily summed up by the four and a half page "Author's Notes" (written by daughter Stella Egbert) at the end of the book. The 1880 Milan Congress fostered abuse and substandard education on generations of deaf people by insisting that they…show more content… Instead of widespread panic, the deafness epidemic had strange and unpredicted consequences. Those individuals learned that there were alternative ways to communicate.
To my disappointment, the book’s substance was spread thin. There was a lack of character development. Each character serves a minute purpose; that one became deaf, the one’s a mom of deaf kids, that one’s an audist, that one’s a clueless politician or militiaman, that one’s money-hungry. Further than that purpose, there is nothing remarkable about any of the characters.
Egbert fails to dig into the psyche of any of his creations, even with Nathan, one of the apparent protagonists who eventually becomes deaf. The narration of his sudden deafness is filled with cliche and both does nothing to move the story forward and nothing to tell us about who he is as a person. Often, the things they say are only bits of information Egbert wants the reader to know but couldn’t seem to figure out a way to show (hence, the ASL 101 lecture one teacher of the deaf gives her