Speak to Me

Virginia Writers Project, Spring 2026

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Reviewed by John Nicolay

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Ben Raterman’s Speak to Me is a quietly ambitious novel that operates on several narrative registers at once: a children’s quest story, a social realist portrait of generational poverty, a historical mystery, and a meditation on storytelling itself—who is allowed to tell stories, who preserves them, and who is erased by silence. What gives the novel its distinctive power is not plot velocity but accretion: meaning gathers gradually through parallel lives, layered timeframes, and the
porous boundary between fact and imagination. By the midpoint of the book, Speak to Me is less about buried
jewels than about buried voices.

At the emotional core of the novel are Justine and Joseph, siblings whose determination and ingenuity provide the novel’s forward motion. Justine, at eight years old, is one of the more fully realized child protagonists in recent literary fiction. She is not precocious in a sentimental sense, but shaped by necessity: she reads adults astutely, understands institutional power (particularly the threat posed by police), and possesses a moral logic that is coherent even when legally naive. Her desire to find Nonna Jannie’s jewels is not driven by greed but by architectural longing—the need for a house that locks, walls that hold, and rooms that provide privacy and safety. In this way, Justine’s “treasure hunt” is really a search for structural stability.

Joseph, younger and more physically expressive, serves as contrast and ballast. Where Justine plans and narrates, Joseph observes and responds. He is drawn to physical detail—bridges, buildings, windows—and often functions as the
novel’s sensory register. His statements are occasionally blunt, even disruptive, but they consistently cut to emotional truths the adults evade. Together, the children form a unit of trust and shared purpose that stands in quiet opposition to the
instability of their home life.

The adult figures orbiting the children are drawn with notable restraint. Rachelle, their mother, is neither villain nor mere victim. Her poor choices—particularly her attachment to Terrell and her normalization of chaos—are rendered without authorial condescension. The novel’s most incisive social critique emerges through Nonna Etta, who recognizes poverty not simply as material deprivation but as inherited constraint: “penury, absence, inferiority... poverty of
imagination.” Etta’s self-reproach is one of the novel’s most devastating moments, suggesting how structural harm is internalized as personal failure.

Equally important is Katy Aldridge, whose storyline expands the novel’s scope beyond the children’s immediate world. Katy is a librarian, archivist, and reluctant fiction-maker—someone who exists between documentary fact and
imaginative reconstruction. Through her, Raterman introduces the question that ultimately governs the novel: when the archive is incomplete, is it better to invent or to remain silent? Katy’s loneliness and sense of stasis mirror the children’s
precarity in a different register, linking intellectual isolation with economic and familial instability.

On the surface, Speak to Me adopts a familiar narrative engine: children set out to recover a lost object that promises transformation. Yet Raterman complicates this structure by dispersing the story across multiple temporal and epistemological planes. The children’s present-day journey unfolds alongside Katy’s archival investigations, which in turn give rise to imagined reconstructions of early-twentieth-century lives—Anna Fitzhugh, Kate Aldridge (namesake and possible double), and Jannie Pratt.

Rather than treating these strands as separate plots, the novel allows them to bleed into one another. Katy’s act of fictional reconstruction is not framed as invention versus truth, but as a necessary response to historical absence—particularly the absence of working-class women and Black labor from official records. The jewels, long assumed to be stolen or lost, become symbolic nodes where class, race, memory, and desire intersect.

The novel’s pacing is deliberately measured. Scenes in the library basement, the trailer park, and the Fitzhugh house are extended and observational, resisting thriller-style acceleration. This restraint is a strength. By slowing the reader down,
Raterman ensures that discoveries feel earned rather than contrived. The narrative tension derives not from whether the children will succeed, but from what success would cost them ethically, legally, and emotionally.

Importantly, Speak to Me avoids the false closure common to quest narratives. Even as plans are made and risks escalate, certainties dissolve. The line between inheritance and appropriation, between justice and transgression, remains
unsettled. In this way, the novel honors its thematic commitment to ambiguity and listening rather than resolution.
 

The greatest strength of Speak to Me lies in its moral seriousness without moralizing. Raterman trusts the reader to sit with uncertainty. The book does not offer rescue fantasies—neither the children nor Katy are “saved” by discovery alone.
Instead, the novel insists that attention itself is an ethical act: listening to children, to under-documented women, to fragments of lives dismissed as inconsequential.

Stylistically, the prose is lucid and unshowy, often slipping into lyric observation without drawing attention to itself. Natural imagery—woods, rivers, old houses—functions not as metaphor overload but as connective tissue between time
periods. The embedded historical fictions Katy writes inside the novel serve a dual purpose: they advance the mystery while also modeling how narrative fills archival silence. Rather than undermining the novel’s realism, these passages deepen it by acknowledging that history itself is already a form of storytelling.
 

If there is a risk in the novel, it is structural: readers seeking clear genre boundaries may find the layering disorienting. Yet this instability mirrors the lives the novel depicts. To impose neatness would be dishonest.
 

Speak to Me is a thoughtful, socially attuned novel that understands storytelling as both inheritance and responsibility. Its principal characters—especially Justine—are rendered with psychological precision and moral weight. Its narrative arc resists easy payoff in favor of convergence and resonance. Most impressively, the novel argues—quietly but insistently—that voices require listeners, and that listening is an act of care.
 

In a literary landscape crowded with spectacle, Speak to Me distinguishes itself by attending to what is small, overlooked, and unfinished—and by trusting that such attention is enough to carry a story.