Reminds me of Westerfeld's Uglies series. It's the future, and people are confined to a couple of cities, so they don't mess up the environment. At some point, it's decided that resources shouldn't be wasted on people who aren't physically able. But rather than those kids being killed, some of them are saved in an underground fashion, both metaphorically and literally.The deaf character was a minor role, so that was a bit disappointing. The main character is an able-bodied girl.Interesting future world and not a bad story. ( )

When I sort my library by "social information", this book ironically comes up right next to David Stahler's [Truesight]. Truesight is a book I have critiqued for its overly negative presentation of blindness; in that book, physical and metaphorical blindness are interchangeable, so those who can't see are ideologically equated with those who choose not to see corruption or evil.

Waterbound, on the other hand, is a book I critique because it is overly ideological in its presentation of disability rights. The basic structure is not the problem, but the occasional speeches, in which the text isn't trusted to speak for itself. Instead, characters are given essays to quote which disrupt from the flow of the novel. In one case, an adult doctor waxes forth on ethics to the young adult protagonist, only to trail off into "... you don't know what I'm talking about. Never mind. I invited you here for you to talk, not me." In these moments, the didactic voice of the author punches through the reality of the fiction, breaking the flow unnecessarily.

That being said, Waterbound is the vastly superior novel. Like Truesight, it tells of a dystopic science-fiction future in which disability plays a major role. There, however, is where the resemblance ends. Waterbound is a world in which disability has been removed, and disabled infants are supposed to be euthanized at birth. Instead, sympathetic doctors have slipped many of the disabled children into a watery world beneath the city, where they have developed a society of their own. There's no hackneyed metaphors here, but a science-fiction novel doing what science-fiction is best at: creating a world which forces us to reconsider our everyday values. ( )