Letta chooses to fight for the very thing that keeps us human: language itself. Letta's faced with a dangerous choice: sit idly by and watch language slowly slip away or follow a stranger on a path to freedom. Then Letta meets a teenage boy who somehow knows all the words that have been banned. John Noa tells Letta she is the new Wordsmith, and must shorten List to fewer and fewer words.

Forbidden words like freedom, music, and even pineapple tell her about a world she's never known. As apprentice to the Wordsmith, Letta can read all the words that have ever existed. Language is to blame for mankind's destruction, John Noa says, as politicians and governments hid the disastrous effects of global warming and environmental damage until it was too late. Patricia Forde won the White Raven Award with her new middlegrade/YA-novel The Wordsmith which will be published in fall 2017 as The List in the USA. As Wordsmiths, young Letta and her master, Benjamin, are charged with the task of maintaining the List, a collection of 500 words that make up the only language available to the residents of Ark. To make sure humans do not make the same mistakes, Ark's leader John Noa decrees everyone in Ark must speak List, a language of only 500 words. With her debut novel, Patricia Forde crafts a richly imagined future society, the development of which feels all too plausible in today’s climate. What if you were only allowed to speak 500 words? The city of Ark is the last safe place on Earth: the polar ice caps have melted and flooded everything, leaving few survivors.

Fahrenheit 451 meets The Giver in an award winning dystopian story about the dangers of censorship and how far we will go in the pursuit of freedom.

Patricia forde the list