Analytical Essay On Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

“You don’t understand, my head voice answers”(28). Written in 1999 by Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak is a book that takes place in the freshman year of a school outcast by the name of Melinda Sordino. After she had ruined an important end-of-the-year summer party by calling the police, she becomes isolated from her classmates and suffers trauma from an unknown event, causing her to be mute. This heart wrenching and ahead-of-its-time story is told in the perspective of Melinda, a victim of sexual assault, and as the story progresses we learn more about the truth hidden behind the thick silence and judgement about what really happened at the party and who was responsible for the unknown incident. After carefully weaving together the elements of

Looking through the eyes of her classmates, Melinda is a social reject, a freak, a target. “The girl behind me jams her knees onto my back…the girl with the arrested brother…yanks my hair…”(29). In a feeble attempt to get revenge, two students used childish antics to get their message of anger across to Melinda. They expressed their resentment for Melinda for ruining a party, but their actions had been influenced by a tiny puzzle piece of information that they had believed to be the bigger picture. They neither witnessed nor asked what happened to Melinda as to why she called the police during the party. When Melinda had finally been able to push through the shame and guilt to reveal that she was raped by the most popular student in their school, Andy Evans, the one person—Rachel—she had told was in denial and called her a freak because in Rachel’s mind, he was perfect. He couldn’t be a monster. In any story, there is more than one side because there are

With ignorant parents, she was unable to get the parental support she needed. Even with the drastic change in behavior and grades, her parents had chose to ignore those warning signs and instead give threats using harsh language and threatening body language, such as grasping a knife at the dinner table(36) to force her to become “normal” again. To them, Melinda was acting like a rebellious child who was acting too “independent” but in Melinda’s world, the truest view, she was just a victim struggling with trauma she couldn’t speak about, suffering from isolation and shame. Even after Melinda’s mother had discovered her attempts of self-harm, she had simply played it off as a child’s desperate need for attention. Tying back to different angles affects views on a situation, this applies to the fact that her parents didn’t have any idea of the harassment she was experiencing or the fact that she was raped, they only knew that she started lacking in academics, giving them the benefit of the doubt when they assumed she was just acting unusual. But at the same time, they didn’t have an overview of the situation so their assumptions that their child was becoming “rebellious” was based on “parental instincts” instead of the