Speaker

A seemingly unusual 14-year-old boy discovers he has the power to speak with animals, and so they with him. It isn’t in any respect like Dr. Doolittle.

After 14-year-old Hamish Taylor loses his father to most cancers, his mom forces him to maneuver together with her from rural Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. Resentful, Hamish avoids his mom and explores his new metropolis, which two years earlier had been struck by the disaster of 9/11. In the future, as Hamish passes close to the ruins of the World Commerce Heart, he’s overcome by a cacophony of voices that bubble up from inside him. He flees by way of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the place a squirrel falls from a tall tree and crashes down in entrance of him, fatally injured. Hamish discovers he can talk with the squirrel-and with crows close by, and with each animal he encounters from then on.

Hamish learns he’s a Speaker, one in a centuries-long custom of uncommon people who’ve the power to speak with animals, and who emerge when the world is confronted by extraordinary crises. However Hamish would not know what disaster he has been referred to as to handle, and never even the animals he speaks to have the solutions for him.

On the similar time Hamish discovers his new energy, he finds that the world round him is greater and messier than he might have imagined. In his personal Brooklyn neighborhood, he encounters a hoop of human traffickers. Determined to free a Russian woman from their grasp, he realizes that Speaker or not, he has lots to be taught.

Speaker is a coming-of-age story about overcoming grief and letting go. It’s the story of how a boy begins to grow to be a person. However it’s also an journey, full of foul-mouthed birds, dim-witted canine, a global solid of characters, and a mysterious panther who lurks in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.