High school junior Joel Higgins has a hard time speaking his truth, so instead he writes texts to people: his principal, his best friend, Andy, and Eli, the girl on whom he has a major crush. He doesn’t actually send the texts, though.

Joel lives with his parents and five-year-old brother, Jace. He hasn’t really found his niche yet. He says “Basically the things that I am good at, they don’t teach in high school.” Other than Eli, Joel is pretty solitary. “I’m always surrounded by people, but I have no real friends. […] The things most kids care about don’t matter to me.”

Joel (and Eli) volunteer at the local soup kitchen as part of their graduation requirements. Many of the people who come in for food are veterans who have been abandoned by the system. Joel forms a sort of attachment to one of these men, and this relationship – although this man does not speak – starts to crack through Joel’s protective shell.

Words We Don’t Say cares very much about words, actually. When Joel’s English teacher suggests his students read all the banned books they can get their hands on (after ranting about how books like Winnie the Pooh have been banned because the bears are anthropomorphized and don’t wear pants), Joel realizes that

free speech [was] something we should protect even if that means sometimes we had to hear stuff that made us uncomfortable and how lucky we were to read whatever we wanted to read even if that only meant sitting on the curb and reading a book out loud to a man who has a Purple Heart that came with delusions and a heartbreak of an illness that nobody could fix.

This book is quite often very funny, but also filled with heart and empathy for a wide variety of characters. Joel eventually starts to understand that he is not the only person who has to carry a broken heart around with him, and it is only when he really starts to reach out to people that he starts down the path to healing.

This is a great book.