This story follows a young Deaf boy through his life as he is trying to cope with the fact that his mother is in a coma and that he is unable to participate in class as expected due to what to me reads as so far undiagnosed adhd and/or autism. His life changes when he makes a new friend at a forum, who turns out to be an intelligent AI that his brother programmed.
The thing I enjoyed most about this story is how it shows that what to everybody else is considered to be an unruly kid acting out maliciously are understandable frustrations born from existing in a Hearing world without being allowed to take part in Deaf culture and be offered necessary accessability. Our Deaf character who was unable to receive Cochlear Implants as a child due to medical reasons was only allowed to learn a limited amount of sign language and is forced to communicate vocally and follow along in class with hearing aids that don't fit. Only one teacher offers him minimal amounts of accomodation there (by speaking a bit slower), whereas everybody else in the school tries their hardest to get him reassigned to a special school as he obviously was just too stupid to follow along (internalized ableism our protagonist reproduces at some points in the novel, which was heartbreaking to read). At points I felt frustrated at how much everybody was ignoring how hard it can be to follow along with a class where you are only able to understand bits and pieces of and how much attention is required if you are not communicated with properly. And while I know that even today some children are still educated with a Speech-First approach it made me really sad seeing how much work went into forcing our protagonist into vocal speech, while we are simultanously told that his father forbid him from learning sign language when he was younger (he has been allowed to learn in the mean time thankfully). I just found this book a really interesting look at how ableism hinders and harms us. However, our protagonist thankfully is allowed a happy end, when the protagonist is finally given fitting support at school (in his case an assistant who translates the coursework into sign and uses humor to keep him engaged) and I was just very glad to read that.
The rest of the plot is also interesting and something I enjoyed. It deals with grief and the environment and of course AI and I think it did so in a very intruiging manner. Another thing I particularly appreciated that the protagonist truly read like a 10 year old although a somewhat precocious one.
There is not a lot of plot and unfortunately the end wraps up pretty fast and while it is nice I found myself missing something, so this is only a four star read, but otherwise I quite enjoyed this book.

TW for child neglect, ableism (particularly regarding mental disabilities and forms of communication outside of grammatically correct spoken language), mental illness, self harm (especially during meltdowns/overstimulating moments).