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 […]
“You’re the one who doesn’t understand, I’ve been standing on the edge with you for years.”
I’ve only read one other book by Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), but this woman definitely knows how to write effective, moving YA. I feel the need to go get everything she’s ever written after finishing The Impossible Knife of Memory. “Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground. Pieces of […]
Silenced
I have heard of Speak before — it’s been out since 2001 — but I never really knew what it was about. I happened to buy the 10 year anniversary edition at a used book sale. There’s a note from the author at the beginning, talking about what a huge response she’s received over the years from her readers about this book. She puts together a collection of lines from readers’ letters, and I swear, the damn thing had me in tears. That’s a powerful book, to move me […]
The Impossible, Interesting YA Novel
In 2014, Laurie Halse Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory was nominated for a lot of awards. After finishing it this morning, I can totally see why. Hayley Rose Kincain is a teenager in upstate New York. She and her father have lived a nomadic existence for several years, until he insists they settle down so she can finish school. They move into his mother’s old home, and she enrolls in a local high school. There, she meets self-described Casanova Finnegan Ramos, and there, her […]