Speak For ME

Lizzie and Maddie Carpenter share the same face. They have never shared the same voice.They are identical twins. Since the night their father's cruelty went too far, Maddie has not spoken a single word, and Lizzie has spoken for her, the two of them holding the world at a distance with a private language of signs and the soft arithmetic of counting through the worst of it.The system was built to save them. It doesn't. Shuffled from a broken home into foster care and finally into a locked facility for girls, the twins meet a long line of adults who look away, doors that lock from the outside, and the slow, terrible understanding that no one is coming. Whatever protection they are ever going to have, they will have to be for each other.And Lizzie has always been willing to be that protection, whatever it costs. She was willing the night everything broke. She is willing still. So when the danger closes in on Maddie again, the only question left is how far a girl will go to keep saving her sister, and whether two people can come through a childhood like theirs and still build something whole on the far side of it.Speak For Me is a harrowing, beautifully restrained novel about damage and devotion, about the institutions that fail the children they promise to protect, and about the bond between two sisters who refuse to be anything but together.Some bonds can't be broken. They can only be tested.Content note: This novel deals frankly with the abuse of children and its aftermath. It contains depictions of child sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect, addiction, graphic violence, the mistreatment of children in state care, and references to suicide. Readers who have lived through similar experiences may find parts of it difficult.