Book review: My Noisy House

Written by Charis Selfridge-Poor
Available from Amazon
Price: £9.99
Ages: 0 to 10

Reviewed by Holly, who is mum to Sybil (7) and Francis (4). Sybil is profoundly deaf and wears cochlear implants, and Francis has glue ear.

‘My Noisy House: A Ling Story’ is a beautifully illustrated rhyming story about a family living in a house with six floors. Each floor represents a different Ling sound – ahh, eee, ooo, shh, sss and mmm. When a child is first given cochlear implants, these sounds feature heavily during speech therapy. If a child can detect all of these sounds, then they should be able to hear speech sounds across all frequencies.

Sybil, Francis and I read the book together at bedtime. The children loved the bright and interesting pictures. There’s loads to talk about on each page, and at the back of the book is a list of illustrations and their corresponding ‘Learning to Listen’ sounds.

I would have found this book particularly helpful when Sybil was first learning to listen and undergoing auditory verbal therapy (AVT) as a toddler. I’ve not seen anything else like it, and the list of ‘Learning to Listen’ sounds is extremely helpful. After we’d read it, we talked about how hard deaf children have to work to listen, as well as how amazing the technology is that allows them to access sound. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone with a young child undergoing AVT, but I’d have loved to have seen a character in the book who Sybil could have identified with more.

Sybil said: “I like the book because it has good pictures and rhymes. My brother Francis likes it too. My mum likes it because it has a snake who is a girl. It could be better if it had someone in it who has cochlear implants or hearing aids.”