Don't Breathe a Word
You have got to be desperate to stage your own kidnapping, but that is just what 16-year-old Joy does. To make matters even more precarious, she suffers from life-threatening asthma, which Cupala uses as a powerful metaphor for Joy’s figurative suffocation in the inescapable trap into which she has been drawn. The first-person narrative shuttles back and forth in time between Joy’s abuse at the hands of her boyfriend (the reader has to add up clues that Joy herself has trouble facing) and her life on the Seattle streets after she has fled from her abuser. Cupala’s depiction of what it takes to survive on the streets and the various perils that can ensnare runaways is vivid and fascinating. This novel recalls Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999) in its psychological astuteness about the many terrifying tendrils connected to teen sexual abuse, and it works just as well on a suspense level, too. Grades 10-12. --Connie Fletcher