Speak

The novel Speak was written by Laurie Halse Anderson and published in 1999. Speak is about a girl named Melinda Sordino who becomes the outcast of her high school entering her freshman year. Melinda is basically shunned from everyone she used to call friends because of an incident that happened to her at a high school party over the summer resulting in her calling the police for help. After this incident Melinda becomes depressed and with no friends to vent to it just makes her situation worse causing her to want to hide from the world and sleep. The only thing throughout this story that keeps Melinda sane is her interest in art. Her art teacher Mr. Freeman understands Melinda’s pain and teaches her how to channel her pain into her art work.    

I feel like this book relates to modern teens today. It shows the struggles that teens face to fit into cliques in high school. Every two minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted so by this statistic you see it happens to a lot of people. I feel this book shows you the effects of the after math it has on people emotionally and physically. Like Melinda a lot of people go through depression. They tend to blame themselves for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They usually keep the sexual assault to themselves hiding it from others because there ashamed or embarrassed from what has happened to them.