May Book Review #6

Book: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Age-range: 13 and up
Recommended: Yes

This is a book that hordes of my writer friends have recommended to me, but I never really had much interest in it.  Yesterday I was going through the books on my (crappy) library's YA bookshelf alphabetically to find books I wanted to read.

My friend Hayden doesn't read the back of books.  She wants to know as little about a book as possible when she reads it.  I admire this.  I have never been able to do it.  With this book I had a vague notion of what it was about, but I decided not to look any further, not to read the inside flap or the back cover or online reviews or anything.  I just read it.  And it was an amazing experience.

This isn't really the type of book you can gush about.  It's so tragic what the main character goes through, which you don't know the full story of until 3/4 of the way through.  You guess, you conjecture, you think you know, but when the truth comes out it's shocking and sad.

I realize that this is a commonly banned book, but I don't believe in censorship.  One of my hero's and favorite authors Shannon Hale has a great recent blog post about it here.  This is a book about difficult things to discuss, but they are things that SHOULD be discussed with your child at some point.

So read the book.  And talk to your kids about it (when they hit the right age).