Thirteen-year-old Joey Willis is used to being left out of conversations. Though she's been deaf since the age of six, Joey has never been allowed by her mother to learn sign lans to read the lips of those around her but often fails.

Everything changes when Joey meets Dr. Charles Mansell and his baby chimpanzee, Sukari. Her new friends use sign language to communicate, and Joey secretly begins to learn to sign. Spending time with Charlie and Sukari, Joey has never been happier. She even starts making friends at school for the first time. But as Joey's world blooms with possibilities, Charlie's and Sukari's choices begin to narrow-until Sukari's very survivial is in doubt.

Inspired by the true stue true syory of Lucy Temerlin, a chim panzee raised as a human child, and the culmination of ten years of research, Hurt Go Happy is the unfor gettable stort of one girl's determination to save the life of a fellow creature－one who shares98 percent of our DNA and who has the ability to communicate with us.

 

was raised in Winter Park,j Florida, and lived in Miami during her career as a Pan American flight attendant. Midway through that career, she enrolled in the University of Miami to Pursue an undergradu ate degree in biology, graduated,and changed direc tion again. She went on to receive an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. Her Goal, after wrapping up her flying career and her grad uate studies, was to move someplace where she would never be hot again She now lives on the chilly coast of Northern California with her twenty five-year-old parrot and way too many cats. Her young- adult novel, Dolpbin Sky, was nominated for the Keystone to Reading Book Award. Rorby was nominated for the Keystone to the Mendocino coast Writers Con-ference for eight years.