When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a student teacher for English II. He read out loud at the beginning of class, which was fun and exciting—the first book he chose was Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. It’s been a favorite of mine ever since. Last year, Anderson teamed up with Emily Carroll to transform her groundbreaking novel into a graphic novel. I was not sure how it would turn out, but one of my former professors is a frequent contributor to a […]
The American Revolution Through Slaves’ Eyes
Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning YA novels set during the American Revolution are superb. Not only does she get her history correct — with fascinating detail about daily life for wealthy and working classes, Loyalists and Patriots, city life and army camp life — but she also provides narrators whose perspectives are unique and provocative. Isabel and Curzon are slaves. Each brings a different view of the revolution and what it means for them as slaves. The three novels take the reader from May of 1776, when […]
young women with no voice, can you hear them yelling?
I seem to have chosen a number of titles that relate to young women with no voice, not physically, but after suffering some form of unimaginable trauma they choose not to speak. . . . Am I trying to tell myself something? Speak – a YA classic from 1999 details the first year at high school for Melinda. Our heroine is isolated from her peers, she doesn’t engage or communicate with her family or school community, but can’t hide her pain at being excluded. Her […]
“What did it feel like to die? Was it a peaceful sleep?”
I’ve read of few of Laurie Halse Anderson’s YA novels. This one is skewed for a slightly younger audience than say, Speak or The Impossible Knife of Memory, but manages an interesting glimpse into the past, led by a strong female character. Late in the summer of 1793, yellow fever killed an estimated 5,000 people (in a city of 50,000) in less than three months. 20,000 residents fled the city, while the rest waited out the disease as their family and neighbors dropped like flies. Fever 1793 lets us watch the epidemic through the […]