Who is allowed to speak in contemporary children’s literature?

The review article focuses on the book Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature by Danielle E. Price (2024). The monograph explores literary representations of speech and silence in selected works of children’s and young adult literature. Price is a renowned American scholar specialising in Victorian children’s literature, disability studies, and gender studies. In her study, the author investigates various aspects of how speech and silence are depicted in contemporary children’s and young adult literature, including alternative forms of speech in portrayals of characters with disabilities, human-animal dialogue in ecological narratives, and silencing based on gender and race.