Silence

Oakley Farrell hasn't spoken in eleven years. She stopped talking at age five, and no one — not her family, not her classmates — knows why. Bullied and friendless at school, she has exactly one person in her corner: Cole Benson, who has never once treated her as broken or waited for her to be "fixed." Over years of their own unconventional friendship, the two have built something that works, on Oakley's terms.

But as their closeness starts to shift into something more romantic, someone from Oakley's past resurfaces, threatening to unearth the reason she went silent in the first place. Silence is the first book in Natasha Preston's contemporary YA series of the same name, a character-driven story about trauma, friendship and first love, told from inside a protagonist who cannot say any of it out loud.