Speech Team

Author: Tim Murphy
Title: Speech Team
Publisher: Viking
Date Published: 08/01/2023

Read Dates: 06/03/2023- 06/04/2023
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

📖 I received a gifted e-book ARC. The following is my honest review✍🏻

I am so very glad I read this book when I did. It was touching and moving and felt like a fitting tribute to my speech team bestie.

The idea of four teammates reuniting with a shared pain of words from their youth that had a lasting impact throughout their adulthood was compelling. That they were all brought together in the first place by a shared love of words made it even more so.

This book was nearly impossible to put down and I’ll have to go back and enjoy it more slowly one day. Hopefully with a physical copy that I can mark up!

A propulsive, witty, and moving novel starring four precocious Gen X teens–turned–twenty-first-century middle-agers who are seeking . . . well, if not exactly justice from a long-ago hurtful teacher, then at least some kind of long-desired reckoning and closure

Late one morning, parked in a desk chair at his humdrum job, Tip Murray finds himself reading the suicide note of his long-lost high school friend Pete Stroman. Mentioned in the note as a root cause of Pete’s despair? A disparaging comment made to him about his developmental disability by none other than their high school speech team coach, Gary Gold.

As more thorny memories surface from their eighties adolescence, Tip and his best friend, fellow speech team alum Nat Farb-Miola, decide to reconnect with their other teammates, and they discover an unsettling thread: all were quietly wounded by Mr. Gold’s deeply cutting remarks. The silver lining? Gary Gold is still alive, and a quick Google search tells the quartet that he has retired to Florida. There’s only one thing left to do: confront him.

By turns incisive and sweet, alive with the sting of wounds past and the hopeful possibility of the present, Speech Team explores what it means to take account of the pain that can suffuse a life and what it means, years on, to move forward.