- About SHOUT Award-winning Speak author Laurie Halse Anderson’s New York Times bestselling poetic memoir and call to action, which garnered eight starred reviews! Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about,.
- TM ® & © 2020 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved. Susan Cheyney GRADES: 1-2.
- Shout: The True Story of A Survivor Who Refused to be Silenced by Laurie Halse Anderson is a memoir written in verse published in 2019. Anderson wrote it as both a personal narrative and a call to action in the wake of the 2017 #MeToo movement, which supported survivors of sexual assault who came forward to share their stories publicly.
- 'Since its publication 20 years ago, Laurie Halse Anderson’s breakout novel Speak has been captivating and shifting the perspective of teens and adults alike.
TM ® & © 2020 Scholastic Inc. All Rights Reserved. Susan Cheyney GRADES: 1-2.
Overview
Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a critically acclaimed poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. In free verse, Anderson shares reflections, rants, and calls to action woven among deeply personal stories from her life that she's never written about before. Praised as 'captivating,' 'powerful,' and 'essential' by critics, this searing and soul-searching memoir is a denouncement of our society's failures and a love letter to all the people with the courage to say #MeToo and #TimesUp, whether aloud, online, or only in their own hearts. SHOUT speaks truth to power in a loud, clear voice—and once you hear it, it is impossible to ignore.
Shout By Laurie Halse Anderson Sparknotes
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. 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.
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.
Shout By Laurie Halse Anderson
Anderson, 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. But the ferociously raw, burning heart of this memoir is the recounting of her rape at the age of 13. In searing free verse, Anderson unloads decades of trauma on these pages. 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.
Lori Halse Anderson
Longtime Anderson fans will appreciate this deeply personal look into how the author channeled her pain into the writing of Speak, and readers new to her work will be swept up in her singular style, which melds bold honesty with fluttering moments of lyrical beauty.