Super Short Summary

Kimberly Elkins’s biographical historical fiction, What is Visible (2014), tells the story of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American child to learn to read and communicate, under the guidance of Samuel Gridley Howe. Overcoming the loss of sight, hearing, smell, and taste due to scarlet fever, Bridgman becomes a celebrity but faces loneliness and jealousy, especially after Howe's marriage.