Anderson, Laurie Halse
SHOUT
New York : Viking, 2019
IL YA
ISBN 9780670012107

2 booktalks

Booktalk #1

Best selling author, Laurie Halse Anderson has written a memoir of her own childhood and coping with sexual assault.  When she was just thirteen years old, Anderson was attacked by a boy she trusted. This changed her world. She writes how she tried to cope and how she eventually turned her life around and now is an advocate for children who find themselves as victims.

Booktalk #2

The author of Speak returns to tell her own story! Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout is heartwarming and heartbreaking. Written in verse, Anderson takes you inside her family’s dysfunction, her father’s PTSD, her mother’s physical abuse towards her, her parents’ drinking, her own struggles in school, and the event that changed her life the summer before ninth grade. Long before #MeToo, she needed someone to talk to but felt she had no one, “…I had never seen a first aid kit for the spirit/or heard the word ‘trauma’ to describe/the way I’d hide, slide through the days unseen/or scream into the pillows/at the bottom of my closet…” Hanging with a bad crowd, her choices were often not good ones, but she found comfort in reading, and then, in writing. “My existence insisted/on listening to the voices in my head distantly/cheering on my ambition.” Anderson’s reason for writing: “stories entertain/engage, outrage/uplift, help us/overcome/our troubles.” (Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award 2020-2021)