Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson (review)

It’s an astonishing twenty years since Anderson’s Speak (BCCB 10/99) gave voice to her protagonist after a rape and, in turn, freed the voices of legions of young readers. Now Anderson provides a free-verse memoir, in a series of titled short entries, first of her youth and her own rape, and then of her experience, after writing Speak, of becoming an audience for other stories of victimization and of speaking out on the issue. The first section sets her assault in a cultural and familial context, with alcoholic dysfunction and physical violence threaded through her home life and the laws of the time skewed firmly away from women’s rights for financial fairness or sexual autonomy, all of this making her rape by a classmate at thirteen somehow unsurprising even as it’s horrifying. The years of her gradual negotiation of her trauma into a viable life presage her later gradually working her role as an author into her life (in a poem about the National Book Awards banquet, Walter Dean Myers movingly inspires and welcomes her). It’s that role that leads to her being the recipient of thousands of stories from girls and boys, women and men, who’ve been assaulted, to witnessing the failure of messaging to boys and girls about consent, privilege, and self-protection, and to engaging with the #metoo movement that her work augured and fed. Throughout, her love of languages and linguistics shows in her style, which ranges from tightly crafted, densely sonorous verse to more freewheeling and even incantatory pieces; many entries will quickly draw interpretation as performance pieces or readers theater. This would partner effectively with Amber Smith’s The Way I Used to Be (BCCB 4/16) as well as Speak, and it will ring out to readers who themselves believe in the power of stories to “share our great/ incarnations of hope.”