Words Were The Enemy - Leah T Williams

What if the words you feared most were never really your enemies?

Every student knows that feeling of pausing before raising a hand, second guessing before hitting send, and staring at a word that has been written a hundred times but suddenly looks completely wrong. Their or there. Affect or effect. Loose or lose. For one seventh grader, these are not just grammar mistakes. They are proof that she does not belong.

But over the course of one unforgettable school year, everything begins to change. A teacher believes in her before she believes in herself. A friend passes notes shaped like little boats. A classmate shares a trick for every hard word. And one girl slowly, stubbornly, and surprisingly discovers that the mistakes she feared most were actually the thing that made her grow.

Told entirely in verse, Words Were the Enemy is a funny, warm, and deeply relatable story for readers of all ages. It is for the student who crosses out sentences before anyone can read them. It is for the teacher who watches brilliant kids go quiet over a spelling mistake. It is for anyone who has ever felt like everyone else got a manual for English that they somehow missed.

This is the story of what happens when you stop running from the words and start using them.