Why Are You So Quiet?

Into a world where it often seems nobody is listening comes a poignant story that celebrates the power of silence.

"Why are you so quiet?" Her teacher implores it, her classmates shout it, even her mom wonders it. Everyone, it seems, is concerned for Myra Louise. So, in search of an answer to the tiresome question nobody will stop asking, she invents a listening machine. If the raindrops, or the crickets, or the dryers at the laundromat can tell her why they're so quiet, maybe Myra Louise can finally make everybody understand. But the more she listens, the less interested she becomes in finding any answer at all. Because Myra Louise comes to realize that all she really needs is someone else to listen alongside her.

With gorgeous illustrations from Risa Hugo, Jaclyn Desforges's first picture book champions introversion and the value of being a listener, a thinker, and an observer in our increasingly loud world.

Jaclyn Desforges is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Contemporary Verse 2, Minola Review and others. She's the winner of the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, and also the winner of two Short Works Prizes: the 2019 Hamilton Public Library Freda Waldon Award for Fiction, and the 2019 Judy Marsales Real Estate Ltd. Award for Poetry. She's an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia and lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her partner and daughter.

Risa Hugo is an illustrator with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Major in Illustration from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She spent most of her childhood living in Japan but currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband and their son.