Speak

Bibliography:

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

ISBN: 0-14-240732-1 

Summary:

Melinda Sordino begins high school with a secret and a reputation as a tattle-tale. Without supportive family or friends, Melinda lives within herself, capturing moments and people within her mind until it all comes rushing out.

Analysis:

Melinda's voice is heard through her thoughts and actions during her first year of high school in Laurie Halse Anderson's touching contemporary realistic fiction novel Speak. The protagonist, Melinda, is a likeable character battling internal and external forces for control of her own voice. Faced with common and uncommon occurences including the "climax of mating season...the Senior Prom" (pg. 176) and the place "where they film daily segments of Teenage Humiliation Rituals" (pg. 104) the cafeteria, Melinda finds herself amongst the masses, just like many students in schools feel around the world. Anderson's authentic language captures the character's es

sence and creates compeling scenes and natural dialogue (both internal and external). Set in any high school across the nation, the text is easily relatable with the central message of finding one's identity or one's voice amidst thousands of other voices. Anderson achieves perfection with Melinda's controversial story that will make the reader laugh, cry, scream, kick and smile all at the same time. 

Reviews:

"A frightening and sobering look at the cruelty and viciousness that pervade much of contemporary high school life, as real as today’s headlines. At the end of the summer before she enters high school, Melinda attends a party at which two bad things happen to her. She gets drunk, and she is raped. Shocked and scared, she calls the police, who break up the party and send everyone home. She tells no one of her rape, and the other students, even her best friends, turn against her for ruining their good time. By the time school starts, she is completely alone, and utterly desolate. She withdraws more and more into herself, rarely talking, cutting classes, ignoring assignments, and becoming more estranged daily from the world around her. Few people penetrate her shell; one of them is Mr. Freeman, her art teacher, who works with her to help her express what she has so deeply repressed. When the unthinkable happens—the same upperclassman who raped her at the party attacks her again something within the new Melinda says no, and in repelling her attacker, she becomes whole again. The plot is gripping and the characters are powerfully drawn, but it is its raw and unvarnished look at the dynamics of the high school experience that makes this a novel that will be hard for readers to forget." - Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1999

"Speaking out at the "wrong" time-calling 911 from a teen drinking party-has made Melinda a social outcast; now she barely speaks at all. A conversation with her father about their failed Thanksgiving dinner goes as follows: "Dad: 'It's supposed to be soup.' / Me: / Dad: 'It tasted a bit watery, so I kept adding thickener....'/ Me: ." While Melinda's smart and savvy interior narrative slowly reveals the searing pain of that 911 night, it also nails the high-school experience cold-from "The First Ten Lies They Tell You" (number eight: "Your schedule was created with your needs in mind") to cliques and clans and the worst and best in teachers. The book is structurally divided into four marking periods, over which Melinda's grades decline severely and she loses the only friend she has left, a perky new girl she doesn't even like. Melinda's nightmare discloses itself in bits throughout the story: a frightening encounter at school ("I see IT in the hallway....IT sees me. IT smiles and winks"), an artwork that speaks pain. Melinda aches to tell her story, and well after readers have deduced the sexual assault, we feel her choking on her untold secret. By springtime, while Melinda studies germination in Biology and Hawthorne's symbolism in English, and seeds are becoming "restless" underground, her nightmare pushes itself inexorably to the surface. When her ex-best-friend starts dating the "Beast," Melinda can no longer remain silent. A physical confrontation with her attacker is dramatically charged and not entirely in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel, but is satisfying nonetheless, as Melinda wields a shard of broken glass and finds her voice at last to scream, "No!" Melinda's distinctive narrative employs imagery that is as unexpected as it is acute: "April is humid....A warm, moldy washcloth of a month." Though her character is her own and not entirely mute like the protagonist of John Marsden's So Much to Tell You, readers familiar with both books will be impelled to compare the two girls made silent by a tragic incident. The final words of Marsden's books are echoed in those of Speak, as Melinda prepares to share her experience with a father-figure art teacher: "Me: 'Let me tell you about it.'" An uncannily funny book even as it plumbs the darkness, Speak will hold readers from first word to last." - Horn Book (from www.barnesandnoble.com) 

Awards:

ALA Best Book for Young Adults

IRA Young Adult Choice

Michael L. Printz Honor Book (American Library Association)

Connections:

• Read Speak's Platinum Edition Bonus Material with author interview and commentary
• Write to Laurie Halse Anderson on her website www.writerlady.com with additional questions and comments
• View Speak movie and discuss differences/similarities between formats
• Write about Sophomore year at Melinda's high school from the perspective of a main character
• Discuss book themes and personal connections to story - include artistic response activity where students depict their thoughts/feelings about the book through any artistic medium (when presenting project, make sure to ask Why? they chose that medium)