The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Eve had beaten her stutter into submission with sheer savage will, reading poetry out loud line by faltering line in her bedroom, hammering on the consonants that stuck until they unspooled and came free.

My husband has had a stutter all his life, and everything I wrote into Eve's speech impediment comes from him: his input and critiques, as well as my own observations in decades of watching him interact with the world. So often in books and movies, characters with speech impediments are portrayed as mentally disabled, as deranged psychopaths, or as the comic relief. I wanted to write a stutterer who was a capital-H Hero.