Away With Words

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A book about family, friendship, and what it means to be you. One of those books you read in one day and think about forever.” Wibke Brueggemann, author of Love is for Losers This book had a paradoxical effect on me. I love puns and use them a lot on social media, and while reading this I found myself thinking of them even more than usual. But it also made me kind of hate them, and the people who can’t stop using them.

Through the visible words, the book also highlights the power of words, language and communication. Ok, here's the deal: a good simile does more than note physical similarities; it adds an additional dimension to the thing being described. If I say that a tree's leaves are like butterfly wings, this communicates something about the shape of the leaves, sure, but also the essence of the leaves themselves, which are perhaps delicate, fluttering, tremulous, and ephemeral (like a butterfly). The first round of Punslingers is endless. In what humans call time, it takes less than two hours. Considering we’d already sat through hours of puns beforehand, though, it feels more like the interminable unfolding in which yarn is knitted into fabric and sewn into clothes and those clothes go out of style. The concept of being able to see other people's words was really interesting as well as collecting and preserving those words. I also really like how Gala and Natalie used other people's words both struggling with English and speaking themselves respectively. Through the words Gala manages to develop her English and become more confident while Natalie uses them to express herself. Natalie struggles with selective mutism through the book which I felt was written well and in a way that was easy to understand and relate to.

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His description of people is even better. As someone who knows what this guy looks like, his description of one punner as “thin, wolfishly handsome, like the star of every student film ever submitted in good faith to a major film festival” (75) is absolutely friggin spot-on. I read that and kind of Owen Wilsoned a squinty wayyow in assent. There’s also the couple that looks like “different eras of Rachel Maddow” and countless other breezy metaphors.

Berkowitz's introduction to the Punslingers scene is a good example of his easy, generous approach to transportive detail and the gauzy metaphors that make this entire book about had-to-be-there moments possible. Gala has moved from Spain where she easily moved between Catalan and Spanish to northern Scotland where she must navigate through a new life with her Dad and his boyfriend in a small community. Once exuberant she becomes silent; once gregarious she becomes lonely. She befriends Natalie, a classmate whose anxiety has isolated her. Natalie’s selective mutism and Gala’s struggle to communicate in English create a bond for the two girls. What’s beautiful about this world, however, is that words and conversations leave traces. Natalie and Gala start collecting their own and other people’s words to communicate, to reflect and to encourage. This makes sense because the whole thing reminded me of FNI, making me sad-nostalgic, and half-tempted to hike up to Brooklyn and compete as Punnsylvania 6-5000 (steal it and die, bitches). The regulars, the joy of doing well, the fear of flopping, the brain freeze in which you forget every pun you know during those 90 seconds: it's all so much like Friday Nite Improvs it hurts. Berkowitz competes and hangs out with these people, trying to understand the allure, get better at puns, and--on at least one amusing occasion--get high and record a podcast. Welcome to Away With Words. We are an independent speech and language therapy service offering assessment and therapy to children and young people throughout Yorkshire. In this story of hope and endurance, we follow a scientist and her team during their search for the elusive 'Giant Arctic Jellyfish'.Gala and her dad, Jordi, have just moved from home in Cataluña to a town in Scotland, to live with Jordi’s boyfriend Ryan. Gala doesn’t speak much English, and feels lost, lonely and unable to be her usual funny self. Until she befriends Natalie, a girl with selective mutism. The two girls find their own ways to communicate, which includes collecting other people's discarded words. They use the words to write anonymous supportive poems for their classmates, but then someone begins leaving nasty messages using the same method – and the girls are blamed. Gala has finally started adapting to her new life in Scotland and is determined to find the culprit. Can she and Natalie show the school who they really are?

Some people like puns. Some people hate puns. And some people absolutely LOVE them. AWAY WITH WORDS is about the third group. Loved both the protagonists, Gala has a wonderful character, a dollop of selfishness totally appropriate to her age and situation, she's kind and brave, with Natalie adding the eccentric flair that brings out her own. Her dad's same-sex relationship is portrayed matter-of-factly and sympathetically, with the family issues she's experiencing resolved within the context of her own school story. Exploring the wonder of words and language, and the magic of friendship, Sophie Cameron’s Away with Wordsis a beautiful, inclusive marvelfor 11+-year-olds. The writing is magic, too, with emotions conjured in synesthetic technicolour, for in this extraordinary story world, words take on a physical form when people speak. They fall from mouths, fly through the air, bounce off walls. And they’re collected, curated and gifted with transformative results, too.

But I wonder, now, how long it will be before I think about the idea of punning without returning to this weird, unsatisfying blip of 2019. Had you told me in high school that I would one day screw up the chance to date a hot, nerdy girl who puns competitively, I would have… well I probably would have just masturbated. But afterwards, I would have felt both happy to have been briefly accepted into such a person’s life, and sad that it didn’t work out. But Away With Words never takes itself seriously, and all that exegesis is pretty much unnecessary. The meat of the reading experience is to be viscerally immersed in the world of Punderdome, because it's fun. And that's mostly because of her wonderful friendship with Natalie. Natalie has selective mutism and knows what it is to not find the right words or to not be able to speak them. They find some common ground, find a way to communicate with each other and start an amazing project. And then they learn that words are nothing but a tool. They can be used for good and for bad. And, most of all, they don't always say what the person speaking them really wants to say. If you wanted, you could read the book as a slice-of-life dispatch from arty, gentrifying Brooklyn: a place so suffused with post-intellectualism intellectuals that an organic community arose around punning, the way small towns spin up Elks lodges. You could read it as the story of how cosmopolitans are reclaiming nerd culture from actual, off-putting nerds. (The O. Henry organizers in this book are insufferable, pun-dantic chauvinists.) It has been fantastic to read this novel. As someone who is a communication specialist and spends a lot of time helping children and young people to adapt and learn how they can better interact, this is a book that might go some way to helping the wider world understand the challenges those with selective mutism face and how we can better support them.” Eimear Monahan, Paediatric Speech and Language Therapist