Melkorka, an Irish Princess, is kidnapped by Russian slave traders, and learns how to survive amidst her captors' brutality while adhering to a vow of silence that gives her unique power.
Having spent his life trying to escape the foster care system, eventually becoming mute to keep out of trouble, twelve-year-old Newboy finally hits the streets, where a discarded ventriloquist's dummy gives him back his voice and his hope.
As a member of a gifted, idiosyncratic, and argumentative family, twelve-year-old Hero chooses mutism until she reconciles the true with the real in her life.
Young Tug Dockery witnesses a brutal act by his grandfather that leaves him unable to speak, so when his parents die, Tug's beloved older brother feels compelled to escape from a hellish labor camp to rescue him from their grandfather's Florida cattle ranch.
Loosely based on Charles Perrault's "Tom Thumb," seven brothers in modern-day France flee their poor parents' farm, led by the youngest who, although mute and unusually small, is exceptionally wise.
Thirteen-year-old Siena's visions of the past intensify when her family moves to the Maine coast hoping her little brother will begin speaking, and she connects with residents of the house from many years earlier who faced a similar problem.
Writing poetry helps fifth-grader Harper Lee Morgan cope with her father's absence, being evicted, and having to skip school to care for her brother while their mother works, and things look even brighter after she befriends a mute girl and a kindly disabled woman.
When fourteen-year-old Drew and her mute younger brother come to live with their father's estranged relatives after their parents' sudden death, they learn that the house is haunted by ghosts and discover a deadly family secret.
Anna chooses not to talk when she enters kindergarten, but then she discovers the pleasures of self-expression in the security of a therapist's office.
