Speak

Anderson, Laurie Halse. 1999. Speak. 10th anniversary edition ed. New York City: Square Fish.

Plot Summary:

After calling the police the night of the "big" summer party, Melinda finds herself an outcast as she enters 9th grade. Everyone considers Melinda a social pariah who ruined everyone's fun. What everyone doesn't know is what happened to Melinda that night in the woods to make her call the police.

Critical Review:

Speak is the story of Melinda's first year of high school and tracks her academic progress at school through the reporting of each marking period. Once a good student with several friends, Melinda becomes quiet, actually selectively mute, and withdrawn. Melinda's former friends turn their backs on her and her new classmates make everyday a living hell for her because she's the girl who called the cops to the end of the summer party. No one knows why Melinda called the police; everyone assumes she did it to be a jerk, but the simple fact is that Melinda was slightly drunk and raped by an older classmate, but she told no one what happened.

Melinda does what many rape survivors do and keeps quiet, and the silence she imposes on herself and the struggle to keep what happened to herself begins to eat at her, especially when she's forced to see IT, as she refers to the senior who raped her. With the inability to cope with what happened to her and no one to really talk to, Melinda acts out. Her parents are self-absorbed in their jobs and don't notice until she becomes a problem for them. Melinda becomes depressed, skips classes, and toys with cutting. The only class she rarely, if ever, skips is art because in art, she can explore the feelings eating her up inside as she struggles to complete her year long project: Making a tree become art by relaying emotion through her impression of a tree. Her first attempt, using bones and a body-less Barbie, has her teacher pronounce that it shows pain. Considering the emotional pain Melinda endures everyday, it is unsurprising that pain is the emotion conveyed by her art.

Melinda's art class also gives her a chance to reconnect with a girl she had been friends with in middle school. Ivy slowly reaches out to Melinda throughout the book as they both struggle in art class (Ivy has a fear of clowns and her year old project involves clowns.).

In the end, Speak is not just about surviving rape. It is about finding your voice, which Melinda does towards the end of the book when her former best friend begins dating IT. Speak is about high school and surviving the cruelty and alienation high schoolers inflict on each other. At one point in Speak, Melinda makes the comment that becoming an adult is the reward for surviving high school and the reward better be worth it. As a high school teacher, I see examples of the cruelty kids use against each other, I remember what it was like to be in high school, and while I know surviving high school was worth becoming an adult, I worry about the experience my students have and that my own children will have. And, the experiences Melinda has make Speak. It isn't just the assault that she survives and overcomes. It's how Melinda grows from all the experiences she has. Melinda's emotions are never hidden as she goes from experience to experience. Readers truly see her pain, her anger, her amusement, her derision, her fear, and her loneliness.

Review Excerpts:

"Divided into the four marking periods of an academic year, the novel, narrated by Melinda Sordino, begins on her first day as a high school freshman. No one will sit with Melinda on the bus. At school, students call her names and harass her; her best friends from junior high scatter to different cliques and abandon her. Yet Anderson infuses the narrative with a wit that sustains the heroine through her pain and holds readers' empathy. A girl at a school pep rally offers an explanation of the heroine's pariah status when she confronts Melinda about calling the police at a summer party, resulting in several arrests. But readers do not learn why Melinda made the call until much later: a popular senior raped her that night and, because of her trauma, she barely speaks at all. Only through her work in art class, and with the support of a compassionate teacher there, does she begin to reach out to others and eventually find her voice." Publishers Weekly

"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. " Kirkus Reviews

Awards:

ALA Best Book for Young Adults
ALA Top-10 Best Book for Young Adults
Michael L. Printz Honor Book (American Library Association)
National Book Award Finalist

Connections:

LSU has a lesson plan for teaching Speak in a 9th grade honors class that has the students do several of the activities Melinda did in school (research suffragates, choose something to depict in art, etc.)

The National Council of Teachers of English has a podcast interview with Laurie Halse Anderson in which she relates a poem she wrote on the 10th anniversary of Speak. The podcast itself is mostly about Wintergirls, another novel of survival (the main character has an eating disorder) written by Anderson.