Brighton Author's Young Adult Novel Explores the Grieving Process

After nine long years - with many breaks and revisions - Amy Ackley's novel Sign Language is finally in bookstores.

Ackley, a Brighton resident, said the book is about a naive teenager who grows up pretty quickly after losing a parent to cancer. The book is actually drawn from Ackley's own experience of losing her father to kidney cancer when she was a teenager.

Ackley spent Sunday afternoon signing copies of her newly published novel at the Green Oak Village Place Barnes & Noble and talking to both parents and teens alike. More than 30 people listened to Ackley read passages from the book and talk about the reasons why she wrote it.

"It's not a memoir - it started that way - but through the years and many revisions, it became the story of another girl, Abby North," Ackley said. "It takes her through the entire grief process. She finds out that her father has cancer when she's 12 and at the end of the book she's 16. And it's as much about the family dynamics -how it changes with the terminal illness of her father - as it is about the aftermath of his loss. It covers the whole spectrum for her."

Sign Language won the Young Adult Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest sponsored by Amazon.com, Penguin and CreateSpace in June 2010. Ackley said there were up to 10,000 entries with one young adult and one general fiction winner. Sign Language was published for the first time in August.

"It's changed quite a bit over years and I had kind of given up hope on it," Ackley said about the book. "It was a writing exercise for me to begin with. I never originally thought it was something that I would try to publish because it was a very personal story for me. To get it out there is exhilarating and frightening at the same time because it is quite an emotional book - and while the story isn't actually mine, the emotions are."

Among the crowd of people were several Scranton Middle School students. Ackley had given a presentation at the school to some of the classes.

Scranton Middle School student Becca Codere, 13, was not one of the students who saw the presentation - but her teacher told her about it. So curiosity to see what the book was about brought her and her father, John Codere out to Barnes & Noble to meet Ackley on Sunday.

"I'm glad we sat down to listen to her," Codere said of Ackley. "I've been through that and it's a story a lot of people can relate to. Becca's always asked questions about what was it like and what her grandma was like - so maybe the book will help her understand a little bit about - unfortunately - the bad side of it and what you go through."

For more information about Ackley or Sign Language, visit www.amyackley.com.