Talk to Me

Ellis, Sonia. Talk to Me. 2016. 164p. ISBN 978-1-943431-23-6. Available at FIC ELL on the library shelves.

Fourteen-year-old Sadina Reyes loves her sister, but seven-year-old Maddie suffers from selective mutism,  which results in her not talking very much to her own family members, and never to a stranger. This causes problems for Maddie at school, and Sadina’s friends know her as the girl who doesn’t speak. Sadina would really love to help her sister, but she’s not sure what she can do.

Sadina loses Maddie at the mall after she and Rio, her best friend, go into a computer store, and it takes forever to find her at the pet store. Worse, that night someone breaks into Sadina’s house and steals something out of her mother’s office desk, and Maddie is the only one who notices the robber. The event traumatizes her and now she can’t even talk to her family. Her mother, who is an engineer working on a brand new battery for cellphones, reveals that the only thing that has been stolen is her coworker’s phone, who had left it at the house after dinner the previous night. On that phone was the only evidence that Flynn has been embezzling money from the lab where they both work, and now Sabina’s mother is about to take the rap for the missing money.

Meanwhile, expensive software has disappeared from the school’s computer lab, and Rio is the prime suspect. It doesn’t help when Sabina remembers that Rio had been eyeing this software with envy at the computer store, and her suspicious increase when she discovers that he has installed the same software on his computer at home.

Now she’s got to help her mother by proving that Maddie has seen that the thief was Flynn, and that Rio did in fact not steal the software. Working with the computer club at school, Sadina hopes that they can reprogram Maddie’s cat robot, named Bella, into a cat that can actually talk to her through artificial intelligence and record her answer. If Maddie won’t speak to humans, maybe she’ll speak to Bella! At least, that’s what Sadina hopes...