Different Frequencies

Review of Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly (USA: Delacorte Press, 2019)
By Dhanya  Lingesh

Stories are the core from which culture evolves. Fairy tales, cautionary tales, nursery rhymes, and even Quidditch-playing wizards serve as conduits for children to learn the ways of the world. Often an undervalued part of child development, children’s literature encourages imagination and sparks creativity by elevating young minds and exposing them to experiences outside their immediate social and spatial enclaves. It teaches them how to respond to challenges and opens their minds to a diverse variety of people and places.

Best for children aged nine and up, Lynne Kelly’s A Song For A Whale is an amazing tale that exposes children to what everyday life looks like for adolescents and families with hereditary disabilities. The novel bravely strays from the path of feel-good children’s fiction to bring readers, both children and adults, fresh and thought-provoking perspectives not only on disability and the deaf community, but also on personal growth, intra- and inter-species communication, and marine ecology.

Named after a whale that had tragically beached itself and died on the day of her birth, the novel’s 12-year-old protagonist, Iris, finds herself a little lost in the silent world she inhabits. Born to hearing parents who find it challenging to communicate “with” rather than “at” her, her only true companions are her deaf maternal grandparents. That is, until she realizes that she may have more in common with her namesake than she originally presumed. Iris, the whale, she discovers, was also deaf.

Rather than framing disability as an impairment that must be overcome for individuals to remain economically or socially contributing members of the community, Kelly paints a different picture. Iris does not surmount but proudly embrace her disability, carving a prominent place for herself in her society. She is bright, witty, passionate, and confident about her strengths and her beliefs. Her favorite after-school pastime is rebuilding radios from Moe’s Junk Emporium, challenging stereotypes attached to both ‘science-y’ female engineers and the disabled.

“For me, listening to the radios was never the point,” she reflects in the opening chapters of the text. “Each one of those sitting on my shelves was a reminder of something I’d done right. They weren’t working till I got my hands on them. Whenever I fixed something, I felt like I’d won a contest.”

Not only does this remind young readers of the merits of recycling and turning junk into gold, but that disability does not hinder people from doing what they love. It is the able-bodied who unfairly presume that the disabled walk on eggshells.

Despite being enrolled, by her parents, in a school predominantly filled with hearing students, (rather than at Bridgewood, a deaf school, as her grandmother suggests), she excels academically with the help of her sign-language translator, Mr. Charles. A professional sign-language interpreter herself, Kelly presents deaf society and sign language in an incredibly eye-opening and candidly honest way. She chooses to differentiate sign-language conversations in italics but still deliberately incorporates them seamlessly into the structure of the text to remind young readers that communication with a deaf person is just like any other conversation and should not be treated any differently.

The importance of communication is seen at multiple moments of the text. In keeping with the general outline of a Bildungsroman, a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adult, the novel also brings to light the challenges of Iris’s disability. Iris’s maturation commences at the very beginning of the text with the death of her maternal grandfather and the grief that she and her grandmother struggle to cope with. Iris manages her grief by crafting verses with a kind of sign-language poetry that she and her grandfather have invented. She later submits a poem, in written form, to her teacher, Ms. Conn, as part of an English assignment.

Leaves waving
Blowing, twirling
Floating current
Land on a riverbank
Mother bird grabs the leaf
And builds a new nest

Unfortunately, however, this poem is ruthlessly rejected by Ms. Conn for the simple fact that the lines do not rhyme the way spoken poetry is stereotypically expected to. Disappointed, Iris reflects, “It didn’t look the same on paper. Paper is flat, so I couldn’t use all the space above and below and around it that I needed to tell the story right. And the words in English don’t have the same shapes as they do in sign language.” Kelly skillfully exposes young readers to the layered perspectives of the deaf community in a way that they can comprehend rather than displaying a false utopia where Iris’s unique language is accepted by all. Her writing makes visible callous ableist assumptions that some children’s writers may prefer to keep hidden in favor of presenting a more lighthearted story. By taking communication into a three-dimensional sphere, Kelly reemphasizes the importance of respectful and sympathetic understanding—we must be open to differing methods of communication that challenge the status quo instead of suppressing creativity. Kelly hopes that, through her novel, young readers will realize and appreciate the complexity that sign language adds to conversations and art.

Kelly beautifully integrates this failure of communication into the ecological subplot of the novel. Iris is introduced to the whale Blue 55 by her, ironically, more sympathetic science teacher, Ms. Alamilla. Iris’s expertise with radio repair allows her to easily understand the idea of sound waves and ‘hertz’ and how different species of whales use different frequencies to speak to each other. Blue 55, however, is a hybrid whose mother was a blue whale and father was a fin whale.

“The problem is Blue 55’s unique voice.” [Iris learns.] “Most whales call out at frequencies of thirty-five hertz and lower, while this lonely whale’s sounds are around fifty-five hertz … Furthermore, his song is in a unique pattern; even if other whales can hear him, they don’t understand what he’s saying. Blue 55 likely couldn’t even communicate with his own parents.”

This agonizing realization touches Iris to the core as she brushes away her tears. She completely sympathizes with the plight of Blue 55, swimming so alone and yet always in search of true companionship. The parallels drawn here between Iris and Blue 55 are carried out throughout the rest of the text. There are even 7 brief chapters in which Blue 55 is personified and given a voice of his own, allowing young readers to picture more vividly the reality that animals are beings with souls and feelings as well. Something that is lost in modern culture since the only ‘exotic’ animals that children see are either caged in zoos or on their flat screens. For instance, heartbreakingly, in chapter 4, Blue 55 reflects that

“He hadn’t always swum alone. Long ago, when the loudest sounds in the ocean were the songs of whales, he’d had a pod. Those first whales had tried to talk to him. Everyday they tried to change their songs to something like his. He returned their calls, but his sounds meant nothing to them … They communicated to one another past him, though him, across him.”

Reminiscent of how Iris’s own parents speak “at” and not “with” her, Blue 55’s lonely journey urges Iris to use her expertise with radio frequencies and sound vibrations to develop a song that Blue 55 will understand. This process reminds her of her namesake, Iris, the beached whale, and her deceased grandfather.

“Did you know she was probably deaf too?” her grandfather signed. “She wasn’t born deaf like we were. The scientists who studied her said it had just happened. Maybe she had been swimming near an explosion from an oil rig or a bomb test.”

Kelly introduces environmental issues here in a way even children can appreciate. Iris learns that reverberating human-caused noises in oceans can deafen whales. Oil extraction, recreational cruises, and various other underwater activities cause sound pollution that disrupts the way whales and other marine creatures communicate. Kelly even discusses these issues in her author’s note at the very end of the novel. “Noise pollution in the ocean has led some whales to change their songs over time. With constant ship traffic and oil drilling, the ocean is far noisier that it used to be … and whales have to adjust their sounds to hear one another over the other noise in the ocean”.

Tragically, it is the whales who are unable to adapt and evolve, like Blue 55, and of course, Iris’s deaf namesake, that are left behind, rejected, and isolated, reminding readers of the punishing fact of Darwin’s survival theory. Just like how a human would retreat into themselves in their loneliness, Blue 55, too, begins to feel the weight of his depressed state.

“It would be easier if he could forget the others he’d sung to. But the memory of a whale is long and deep.” [Blue 55 reflects.] “He dove below a wave. The deeper he swam, the more the water resisted, pushed him back up where he didn’t want to be. At the ocean’s surface the sunlight illuminated the whale families he couldn’t belong to. He pushed back, swimming harder, until the dark swallowed him. The depths were emptier, darker, quieter. Yet less lonely, because there was no one to answer his calls with silence.”

With her grandmother’s help, Iris deceives her parents and finds herself on a cruise ship that takes her to a marine observatory where she hopes to play her song for Blue 55 to hear. Surmounting the challenges that come her way, Iris eventually manages to build her own underwater speaker, which she uses to successfully communicate with Blue 55. In the final chapters of the novel, she dramatically jumps into the ocean as Blue 55 appears, and makes contact with him, creating another poem that she signs for him in the water.

Your music sailed through the ocean
and over the land
and carried me here.
Sing your song.

“I will never write down this poem,” Iris reflects. “It belonged to this whale, and I’ll leave it here in the sea, where it will live in the space above and below and all around him.”

Nevertheless, despite this cathartic and emotional resolution, a jarring problem that I find in Kelly’s novel is the reality that the song recording does not actually solve Blue 55’s loneliness. All Blue 55 hears is sound vibrations with no actual origin. As though a ghost has arisen, comforted him with its phantom voice, and then disappeared once again. This raises many questions, especially as it relates to charity work in the twenty-first century. It is not uncommon for students to go on short-term overseas mission trips, day-trips to orphanages, or even for celebrities to visit less-developed countries, take a couple of photos, hand out food and gifts, and then leave the local people with the inevitable frustration they feel when they realize that these charitable efforts are temporary. Kelly does attempt to deal with this issue by having Iris’s brother, Tristan, sign to her candidly, “I know you don’t like to leave anything broken. Make sure that’s not the reason you want to do this. You can’t go in there and fix him like he’s a radio.” Considering that, earlier, Iris herself reflects that rebuilding and fixing things makes her feels as though she’s “won a contest,” we must be wary of the message that readers receive, for although Kelly attempts to caution her audience against turning the impaired into pet projects, the ending of the novel seems to encourage this kind of thinking, which works against Kelly’s larger message as Blue 55’s end seems just as lonely as before. “After swimming in warmer waters for the winter, maybe he’d come back here, to this place where he’d heard his song,” Iris reflects. “And he’d remember a girl who swam with him when it first played.” Iris, too, then becomes just another ghost in Blue 55’s long and deep memory of lost relatives and passing acquaintances.

Iris’s journey, nonetheless, is a successful one that young readers will appreciate and learn from. She discovers her strengths, her passions, and even the confidence to convince her mother to enroll her in Bridgewood so that she can mingle with other deaf students rather than having to struggle to communicate each day. With her renewed passion for both radios and whales, Iris hopes to eventually be a bridge between the hearing and deaf communities by becoming an acoustic marine biologist who studies whale communications. Young readers will be inspired by Iris to take steps to understand both the deaf community and modern ecological issues. It is only by embracing these real-world challenges and exposing children to the social and ecological realities of life from an early age that we can hope to alleviate climate change and build a more diverse, collaborative, and accepting community of equals fighting to save the same oceans, whales, and children.


Dhanya Lingesh is a current Master's student in English Literature at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University with a research focus on ecocriticism.