Speaker

A seemingly ordinary 14-year-old boy discovers he has the ability to talk with animals and they with him. It is not at all like Dr. Doolittle.After 14-year-old Hamish Taylor loses his father to cancer his mother forces him to move with her from rural Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. Resentful Hamish avoids his mother and explores his new city which two years earlier had been struck by the catastrophe of 9/11. One day as Hamish passes near the ruins of the World Trade Center he is overcome by a cacophony of voices that bubble up from within him. He flees through Brooklyns Prospect Park where a squirrel falls from a tall tree and crashes down in front of him fatally injured. Hamish discovers he can communicate with the squirrel-and with crows nearby and with every animal he encounters from then on.Hamish learns he is a Speaker one in a centuries-long tradition of rare individuals who have the ability to talk with animals and who emerge when the world is confronted by extraordinary crises. But Hamish doesnt know what crisis he has been called to address and not even the animals he speaks to have the answers for him.At the same time Hamish discovers his new power he finds that the world around him is bigger and messier than he could have imagined. In his own Brooklyn neighborhood he encounters a ring of human traffickers. Desperate to free a Russian girl from their grasp he realizes that Speaker or not he has a lot to learn.Speaker is a coming-of-age story about overcoming grief and letting go. It is the story of how a boy begins to become a man. But it is also an adventure filled with foul-mouthed birds dim-witted dogs an international cast of characters and a mysterious panther who lurks in Brooklyns Prospect Park.