LS 5623 Advanced Literature for Young Adults

Anderson, Laurie Halse. 1999. Speak. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 0142407321

Melinda is an outcast. Over the summer she called the cops during a party and got a lot of kids busted for drinking. She spends the rest of the summer doing nothing at home. When school starts, no one, not even her best friend, will speak to her. Not that Melinda has much to say anyway. She rarely speaks to anyone anymore. Her grades take a nose dive as things like homework and class seem less and less important. She spends a lot of her time in an abandoned janitor closet at school. Her parents barely notice that something is wrong, and are more concerned with the symptoms, such as her failing grades, than getting to the root of the problem. Her one bright spot is Art class. As the year goes by, we learn through flashbacks that the reason Melinda called the cops was because she was raped. She spends the year trying to come to terms with what happened. When her ex-best friend begins dating the very boy who raped her though, Melinda must decide whether to remain silent, or to finally speak.

"Anderson expresses the emotions and the struggles of teenagers perfectly. Melinda's pain is palpable, and readers will totally empathize with her." I agree with this quote from a 1999 School Library Journal article. Anderson's tale of a teen dealing with rape is heart rending, but not so heavy that the reader cannot get through a page without crying. Though Melinda does not speak much, her witty internal monologue makes the reader smile at her descriptions of the various cliques and the quirks of teachers. The most successful element of the story however is symbolism. Throughout the story trees are woven to symbolize where Melinda is on her journey to coming to terms with what has happened to her. Her art project for the year is to draw, sculpt, paint or use whatever medium she wishes to create a tree. She spends the year toiling over the tree, tossing out draft after draft and trying all sorts of mediums and styles, trying to get it perfect. In the end, she realizes that her tree "isn't perfect, and that's what makes it right."

Almost a second character in this story are the very defined cliques that exist at this school. Where Melinda didn't make any effort to fit in, Heather, the new girl, is perhaps an echo of the person Melinda might have been had she not been raped. Heather spends her time trying to figure out which cliques will get her farther in her social standing and proceeds to do everything she can to befriend those people. Ultimately shallow, the reader is glad when Melinda stops accepting Heather's fair-weather friendship, and perhaps in doing so saying goodbye to a piece of her old life that she knows will never come back.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is the expression of hope given by the last lines: "Words float up. 'Let me tell you about it.'" Melinda is changed, but eventually she's going to be ok. That is something that readers can take away from this story. Knowing that bad things happen but that one can recover. Recommended for 8th grade and up.



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