Speak

Speak
By Laurie Halse Anderson
Puffin Books, 2001. 197 pgs. Young Adult

In this very readable sometimes funny, yet very serious story, Melinda Sordino begins her freshman year in High School. Her observations about school, teachers, parents, and the other kids at school are very funny and will resonate with many of the teens this book targets. Although the reader might be entertained by Melinda’s thoughts, her fellow students mostly treat her as an outcast. Her friends from Jr. High have all moved on into new groups and cliques leaving Melinda to face her freshman year mostly alone and isolated. She begins the year with a sore throat which worsens as the school year grinds on and she finds it increasingly difficult to speak—yet she has something important to say. You see, in her isolation and Melinda is dealing with the fact that she was raped by a boy at a party shortly before the beginning of the school year and she hasn’t told anyone.

SML