Eight-year-old Aven Green is despondent when she does not master the piano in one day, but with new inspiration from guitarist Mr. Tom, who is armless like her, along with a special gift from her great-grandma, Aven learns she does not need to be perfect to perform.

Three years after being kidnapped and rendered a "live specimen" in a cruel experiment to determine the cause of her deafness, fourteen year old Mary Lambert is summoned from her home in Martha's Vineyard to the mainland to teach a younger deaf girl to communicate with sign language. She can't help but wonder, can a child of eight with no prior language be taught? Still, weary of domestic life and struggling to write as she used to, Mary pours all...