SPEAK, A Book by Laurie Halse Anderson

Regarding: SPEAK.
Anderson, Laurie Halse. SPEAK. New York: Penguin, 198 pp.
Adolescent Literature: Depression, Surviving Sexual Abuse, Coming of Age

Here's what Miss Martha Says about SPEAK...

Told in the first person, this book leads us through the tormented school year of a rape survivor. Melinda Sordino confides in us the daily humiliations she experiences at the hands of her classmates and schoolmates over a misunderstanding. Students in school believe that she called the police to break up a party with underage drinking. Actually, Melinda called the police because she had been raped at that party; however, when 911 picked up, she couldn't speak. Over the course of the school year, Melinda sinks into a deep, self-destructive depression. She chews at her ineffective and useless mouth as she fights between the desire to talk about what happened and the desire to keep the words from flowing out of her bloody mouth. She finds an exploratory outlet in the somewhat unconventional classroom of the Art teacher; but, outside of Art class, she is met with only hostility, apathy, shallowness, and selfishness from her parents, other teachers, the school, and people she calls and used to call friends.

I don't think that I was a huge fan of this book. While the story may actually represent someone's experience, I found it unlikely that Melinda would be so completely, unilaterally unhelped by every human being but the dotty art teacher. Her world was so very dismal and populated with shallow, self-serving apathetic jerks, that I wasn't sure if I wanted her to speak. The only time I had any hope at all was when there were responses to the writing about her rape that she put on a door in the bathroom. I was also encouraged by a character who seemed to come into relief only later in the book, Ivy, who actually takes a modest interest in Melinda's recovery from silence and rape.

The pert ending, after being dragged through 9 months of hell, was jarring, to say the least. In my personal experiences with bullying, abuse and neglect, there is just no way that things swing around for the better so quickly. More accurately: if things do swing around quickly, they usually don't stick! It's too much change, too soon, and there is usually a correction.

While I enjoyed Anderson's word choice, structure, and pace (most of the time) I'm not sure that I'm thrilled with her character development or her depth of knowledge about adolescent girls. It seems to me like Anderson placed Melinda's "old friends" in convenient cliques, after the party was over, almost like she had misplaced game pieces and just stuck them here and there to get them out of her way. While, as a writer, I've done that type of thing for myself so that I could attend to whatever was immediately at hand, I would then go back to those characters and work on each of them, shaping and shading them until they would reveal themselves more completely rather than just being stereotypes. So, all in all, most of the characters seemed like they were in "first draft" land.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. There is simply too much literature out there to choose from that better captures stories of rape and/or depression and/or abuse and/or PTSD. However, having said that, I think it's very important, when recommending a book with one or more of these themes, that the student to whom you are suggesting it, is READY to face these issues. A book like this one could easily boomerang back and hit a student who's already down, legitimizing a further slide downward. By the same token, for a student who's ready for a book like this, the story can give multiple opportunities for reflection and personal growth. That's what Miss Martha Says.