Helping Piper wrangle the group are her brother Finn, and Baz Firkin, an aging rocker whose help with recording their music is the 'prize' they won in the Battle. The Five Flavors Piper has to work with are Josh, lead singer and hot guy, his brother Will, Tash, a goth girl in training, Ed, Piper's chess buddy and a classical musician, and Kallie the hot girl Josh pushes on the group. Piper has her work cut out for her before she's even begun, not least because she's profoundly hearing impaired. They're undisciplined, unpracticed and barely able to even read music. Though the band just won a teen Battle of the Bands in Seattle, they did so knowing only one song well enough to play as a group. The narrator is Piper a senior in high school who accidentally agrees to be Dumb's manager and accepts their challenge to get them a paying gig within a month. So begins Five Flavors of Dumb, a sharp, funny, heartfelt novel that hit all the right notes (sorry I had to go there). And the way I saw it, Dumb didn't have much of either.' It just encouraged people to question the band's intelligence, maybe even their sanity.

If I'd been their manager back then I'd have pointed out that the name, while accurate, was not exactly smart. (Nov.'For the record, I wasn't around the day they decided to become Dumb. Relying on help from unexpected sources, Piper learns important lessons about music and media hype, while growing closer to her family and friends in the process. In this witty yet thoughtful behind-the-music account of Dumb's journey to semistardom, John (Busted: Confessions of an Accidental Player) creates a series of humorous surprises while demonstrating how Piper's deafness, which is integral to the story and never feels like a gimmick, affects her life and those of her parents and brother, who are equally complex and well-developed characters. However, it soon becomes apparent that the members' egos are more substantial than their talent. Opportunity knocks when a disorganized rock band named Dumb invites her to be their manager.

But one thing is clear: Piper has to replenish the funds. 'Seriously, what family with a history of hereditary deafness names their child after the player of a musical instrument?' High school senior Piper, who began to lose her hearing at age six, has mixed feelings about her parents dipping into her college fund to pay for cochlear implants for her hearing-impaired baby sister.

Five flavors of dumb by antony john