Serendipity. I read two books this week about children who are traumatized and lose their ability to speak. I wondered how common this “selective mutism” or traumatized mutism is, so I looked it up. It turns out that selective mutism is rare, and mutism caused by trauma is quite rare, almost nonexistent. But it makes for a good story.

While fishing in the Scilly Isles off the coast of Britain, Alfie and his father find a young girl on a small, uninhabited island, and they bring her home with them. The girl is injured, near death, and she speaks only one word: “Lucy”. So they call her Lucy Lost, not knowing where she came from or how she came to be abandoned on the island. World War I is bringing changes to the island where Alfie lives, and Lucy becomes a victim of the islanders’ ignorance and fear as many of them come to believe that she is actually a German girl, perhaps even a spy.

One of the best World War I middle grade novels I’ve read, Listen to the Moon would be a good companion novel to Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, a nonfiction book about the sinking of the Lusitania. Read Dead Wake (for adults) first, and then read Morpurgo’s story of Lucy Lost, Listen to the Moon. In fact, I would have titled the book Lucy Lost instead of Listen to the Moon. Lucy Lost is more memorable, whereas Listen to the Moon sounds just like a dozen other book titles that wouldn’t stick in the mind for very long. (Yeah, I just typed in “moon” and “listen” in the search bar at Goodreads and came up with Goodnight Moon, Walk Two Moons, The Moon and More, Moon Over Manifest, The Moon Is Down, Just Listen, I Should Have Listened to the Moon, and too many more. I definitely have a future career as a book namer.)