Speak

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. New York City: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999.

Melinda Sordino is dreading her first day of high school after a summer when an event occurred that forever changed her perspective. This trauma has caused Melinda into turn into herself and rendered her nearly speechless. Her former friends are falling into new groups, leaving her behind and Melinda is infamous around her school for calling the cops during a raucous house party. She struggles not only socially but also at home; with a distracted father and overworked mother, Melinda rarely gets the support she needs. During the first week of school, Melinda cautiously makes a friend in overachiever Heather, a new transfer, whom Melinda does not really like. Unable to cope with joining her classmate in mundane activities, Melinda finds a sanctuary in a forgotten janitorial closet and makes it into a space she can sit and think. As school continues, Melinda’s grades continue to plummet (although she seems to excel in and take interest in art) and it is finally revealed that the source of Melinda’s behavior change is that she was sexually assaulted by Andy, a popular senior at the party she imploded. Disclosing this information to her ex-best friend (who is the first person she reveals this to), who is now seeing Andy, Melinda is met with disbelief and she becomes further defeated. As she is cleaning out her closet toward the end of school, Andy, her attacker, confronts her about the things she is saying, intending to force himself upon her again. Luckily, Melinda is able to shove open the door of the closet, where she finds members of a girls’ sports team have arrived to defend her.

Speak takes the form of diary-like entries following Melinda through the four marking periods in her first year of high school. Anderson does a fantastic job giving Melinda a strong point of view, creating an often witty and sometimes sorrowful outlook on the world she is forced to participate in. Reviewers in both School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly note that Anderson writing style make the “pain” that Melinda is going through “palpable.” Teen readers will find the writing style easy to follow and the plot realistic through the character development that Melinda and other characters are given throughout the story. The reader is easily transported to the surroundings that Melinda is in everyday, with vivid, yet not overwrought, descriptions of classrooms, bedrooms and the outdoors. These descriptions lend themselves nicely to involve the reader further in the story, yet do not detract from the story itself.

What is most intriguing about the novel is the fact that not everything that Melinda is going through is revealed all at once; her story is peeled back like an onion, layer after layer, in a methodical way. Melinda is giving bits and pieces to the reader, slowly, as if she is attempting to forget the situation herself. Melinda is dealing with a weighty situation, one that she has not even come to terms with yet. She runs into her attacker saying, “IT found me again,” a sentence that is indicative of her state in confronting the issue. This writing strategy gives the work a realism that would be overlooked were all of the circumstances of her situation been given upfront. Taking on such a weighty topic could certainly cause a writer to too heavily focus on a sermon about rape and the perils of high school, but Anderson keeps a light hand in this regard. The end of the story, where Melinda is faced with her attacked yet again, feels a bit trite, but the transformation that she makes throughout the story gives a feeling tangibility.

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