Review of The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk

This is the funniest book I have read in quite a while, and I just couldn’t put it down.  Will Halpin is deaf.  He has finagled his way out of the “deaf school” and into the local high school, even though he will have to completely rely on his lip-reading skills.  The public high school doesn’t have a closed-captioning system, or interpreters like the fancy private schools.  He bumbled his way through a hearing test by guessing, lip-reading and promising to wear his hearing aids, which he usually just carries in his pocket.  On the bus, he learns that if he sits in the seat behind the bus driver, he can watch the other kids in the bus driver’s mirror and read their lips to see what they’re talking about.  People mostly ignore him, even though in every class he gets seated in the front corner of the room so that he can read the teacher’s lips, if they keep facing him, that is.  His math teacher, the sexy Miss Prefontaine, turns her back on him so she can make snide comments about him when she catches him reading his history textbook in math class (other bad things come out about her later in the story).  There’s the usual pecking order, and the only kid who befriends Will is the second-least-popular student, Devon, who knows very basic sign language.  Later in the book, he gives Will a PDA so they can text each other, even when they’re together, which I thought was brilliant.  During a class field trip to a coal mine, the most popular kid disappears, and then is found dead at the bottom of a mine shaft.  Is it murder?  Will and Devon decide to team up like the Hardy Boys to try and solve the murder, but when they break into the school to look at the footage of the police interrogations, Devon has them fast-forward through his.  Is he somehow involved?  Some funny things from the book: Will calls the school bell a sound-impairment discriminator; instead of et cetera, Will says et crapera; when his mom signs to him during dinner, he tells her not to talk with her hands full; once when his mom asks him, “What’s that noise?” he says, “You’re asking the wrong guy.”  Review by Stacy Church