How do you explain music to a person who doesn't hear? It seems an impossible task. Second-time author Antony John takes that question one step further in FIVE FLAVORS OF DUMB and asks: how do you explain music through a person who doesn't hear? Granted, his protagonist Piper wears hearing aids that allow her to hear to a small degree; but it is from somewhere deep inside, where music is just a vibration that she feels in her chest and coming up through her feet, where she really connects with the pounding rhythms of the Seattle rock scene.

When Piper boasts that she could get a paying gig for a local high-school band, she finds herself inadvertently voted in as the group's manager. The members of Dumb, the band Piper has chosen to manage, each have their reasons for joining a band, and for being attracted to rock in the first place. As she comes to understand these band members, Piper starts to understand rock itself.

Her family thinks her being a band manager is a joke, but Piper takes the job seriously, which only serves to underscore the differences between the way she sees herself and the way her parents see her. Piper doesn't consider herself disabled, just different. She is upset at her parents for getting cochlear implants for her profoundly deaf baby sister, and the complex emotions involved with this give insight into what it is like to be a deaf child in a family with hearing parents -- or a hearing child living with deaf parents, as was her mother's case.

Rather than didactically preaching tolerance or having dealing with deafness be the entire point of the book, Piper's story is more about recognizing how the history of rock reflects her own feelings of differentness and connects her to her family. She doesn't triumph despite her disabilities. She triumph's because she's smart and creative. That makes this an important book for a YA reader seeking a starting place to understand deaf culture.