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Speak Book Report

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You Cannot Choose Your Family
Have you ever thought about your mental, social health and your mental growth? In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, it is brought up that the people who are around the main character, Melinda, affect her mental, social health, and her mental growth. How family and friends or even the people we hardly know can make an impact on our lives in both negative and positive ways. Melinda demonstrates this throughout the entire book. “I bet they’d be divorced by now if I hadn’t been born. I’m sure I was a huge disappointment. I’m not pretty or smart or athletic. I’m just like them— an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies. I can’t believe we have to keep playacting until I graduate. It’s a shame we can’t just …show more content…

So, because she does not feel she can have someone who will understand her and not punish her for what happened, she does not speak. Her parent’s behavior toward her and each other make herself feel like she is a disappointment. Her mental state of mind is unstable and is struggling to process what happened to her. When her family and the people around her start pulling her down, she does not feel as strong and confident to stand up for herself and to face her so to speak demons. A perfect example of this is “I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush. Mom sees the wrist at breakfast. Mom: “I don’t have time for this, Melinda.”(Anderson 88). Her parent hardly pay attention to her so she tries to deal with the constant memory of the incident on her own. Her friends from previous years all ignored her for what had transpired at the party. She felt no one cared so her depression became more serious. All that they did hurt her and socially scarred …show more content…

Before, she was innocent, confident and happy her state of mind was good and she had good grades. At the beginning of the novel she was depressed and super unhappy with her life, herself and her grades were bad. That kind of shows in this statement “I used to be like Heather. Have I changed that much in two months? She is happy, driven, aerobically fit. She has a nice mom and an awesome television. But she’s like a dog that keeps jumping into your lap. She always walks with me down the halls chattering a million miles a minute. My goal is to go home and take a nap.”(Anderson 24). It also shows that she knows that she has mentally change greatly in just two months. As Melinda goes through the school year, she starts to realize that she was raped and that she needed to tell someone. The first person she tells Rachel, she tells because at the time Rachel was dating Andy and Melinda did not want her to be hurt by Andy. That right there shows that she had grown a lot since it had happen she had put someone else before her own comfort to protect them. She had finally spoken and that was the beginning of her healing process, she’s becoming healed and will be able to actually focus on her grades and things that make her

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Black Elk Speaks, is a personal narrative that tells a story about Black Elk who is a medicine man of the Lakota tribe; the book is narrated by John Neihardt and is twenty-five chapters long. Black Elk mostly talks about the visions he had when he was a young child. Black Elk explains to Neihardt that he had his very first vision when he was five years old and he says that he saw two men appeared in the sky singing a sacred song (Black Elk Speaks p.17). The second vision that Black Elk tells Neihardt about is a very detailed one that takes place when he falls ill for a few days. The vision that he had involved him seeing a highly detailed symbolic message from his ancestors.

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She feels suffocated by her depression and does not know how to deal with

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She faced her parent's tragic incident but at the same time it does not give her the permission to do as she

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But eventually she ends up figuring out everything. Lilly had a very rough start to her life. But this makes her become stronger than everyone else that had it easy. She becomes a better person

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She felt guilt for hiding her parents from the people in her life, and she felt like she was living a lie. Also, she feels guilty because her parents are homeless and living on

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It showed that the pressure of always being perfect and beautiful was hard on her. I also liked that most students can relate to being pressured to be something they’re not. I disliked that I felt the length of the book on multiple occasions. I identified with Paige because I have also been pressured to be someone I don’t want to be. In the story, Paige is pressured to be perfect and make no mistakes and this often happens in real life.

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At the end of the story she finally found her voice and was able to stand up for herself. In the beginning, Melinda didn't talk to anyone, barely even to her parents. She says, “I have tried so hard to forget every second of that stupid party and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can't tell them what really happened” (Anderson, 28).

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947 Words | 4 Pages

She realized that she was stubborn and gave undeserved loyalty to her husband. I believe that all the characters (mother, sister, lover and others) had a huge impact on that transformation, but the person who had the most impact was Derrick. She was expecting him to work, study, and keep his head down thus he could leave prison early and be back with her. One instance that proved to her she was being fooled by Derrick was when she noticed the scare on his neck, and she asked him what it was then he replied that it was a street thing.

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1136 Words | 5 Pages

Although she does not offer subjective opinions on her experiences, these experiences clearly affect her in a negative manner. She attempts to disconnect herself from the world around her, but instead becomes a silent victim of the turmoil of the chaotic

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805 Words | 4 Pages

After Melinda admits to herself that she was raped, Melinda starts to realize that

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She feels ashamed and blames herself for not being a good enough wife for Tom, just as Melinda feels guilty as though the rape was her fault, even if it really wasn’t. It is later revealed that in reality, it was actually Tom who had done all those atrocious things. He would lie to Rachel, blaming her for all the things he had done, just to make her feel guilty, weak, and worthless. Just how Andy had made Melinda feel after he raped her. With this connection, I can better understand Melinda’s character through Rachel’s in The Girl on the Train, which I read and enjoyed before I read

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736 Words | 3 Pages

Isolation is when one is set apart from others and is virtually alone. In Laurie Anderson’s Speak, the protagonist, Melinda, isolates herself and is further isolated from others. Isolation can be seen through three symbols: lips, mirrors and a closet. Melinda thinks no one cares about what she has to say, resulting in silence. After the incident in the summer, Melinda cannot bare to look at herself.

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711 Words | 3 Pages

While reading the story, you can tell in the narrators’ tone that she feels rejected and excluded. She is not happy and I’m sure, just like her family, she wonders “why her?” She is rejected and never accepted for who she really is. She is different. She’s not like anyone else

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734 Words | 3 Pages

The novel Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is about a girl named Melinda, who shows signs of depression throughout the story. She has no friends and is hated by people she doesn’t even know. This is because she called the cops at a party, where she was raped. Anderson includes literary elements to show how Melinda is depressed. Throughout the novel, she uses many different literary elements to show Melinda’s conflict.

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1197 Words | 5 Pages

Melinda, in a lot of ways, starts out like that it the book. She becomes a shell of herself from before the party happened and because no one else was there, she is lonely and doesn't have anybody to go to and to make matters even worse, she’s covered by the reputation that she has formed. In the book, Laurie Halse Anderson uses symbolism to convey exactly what Melinda can't say. In the beginning of the book, Melinda starts high school carrying her emotional wounds with her after something happens mysterious to her at a party during the summer.

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