Although younger teens will benefit from being able to unpack and discuss many passages with an emotionally available adult, there’s good reason to believe that SHOUT will become popular assigned reading in classrooms around the country-especially in light of our atrocious cultural problem with rape, sexual abuse and consent. In searing free verse, Anderson unloads decades of trauma on these pages. But the ferociously raw, burning heart of this memoir is the recounting of her rape at the age of 13.

Now, Anderson is breaking ground again with a memoir-in-verse that challenges categorization and the ways we’ve thought about the YA genre for the past 20 years.Īnderson, now 57, begins with short glimpses into her tumultuous early childhood in upstate New York, and we quickly learn about her veteran father’s PTSD and ensuing domestic violence, which informed her 2014 novel, The Impossible Knife of Memory. After Anderson’s story of a high school student reckoning with the rage and pain of her rape became a bestseller, the dark and painful parts of adolescent life were up for exploring, and the coming-of-age experience was worth writing about. Importance: Shame is a recurrent motif in connection with victims, particularly those victims.Laurie Halse Anderson’s groundbreaking 1999 novel, Speak, drastically changed the ways in which authors wrote about teenage characters, helping to usher in the modern young adult genre as we know it today. The taste of shame smells/like stubborn vomit in your hair/lingering no matter how often you wash it True north can be defined as self-actualization. References to north recur throughout the work, underscoring Anderson’s quest for direction and navigation to find her way back to her true self. Importance: This disorientation foreshadows Anderson’s loss of identity and direction following the rape. Spinning/at the center a compass that had lost/her true north This quotes how paralyzing victimization is. Silence becomes a habit, a coping technique to ward off further assault. Importance: This characterization of Anderson’s mother’s silence crystalizes the fears of all victims.

(stained glass curtains in my mother's mouth paragraph 11) He didn’t ever hit/ her again, but she lived in the fear/that he would, which had everything to do/with her habits of silence'

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson