Laurie Anderson’s novel, Speak, is about a teenaged girl named Melinda, who is in school and has to overcome her fear to speak about a terrible secret. The convincing setting and the compelling theme makes it easy for students to relate to the story; it takes place in a typical high school and the author reveals the hardships of being young and also being depressed. The characters are very stereotypical people in terms of school as there is the lonely girl, the popular girl, the nice girl, and then the bully, or in this case, the rapist. All three of these contribute to Melindas sorrow or happiness.
As noted above, the various characters in the novel reflect typical teen personalities; school figures. Melinda didn’t speak of anything that had much value for the majority of the year. Melinda is very shy troubled, and depressed. Her parents weren't involved almost at
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The closet served as a safe spot for Melinda and I thought it was interesting how it started out a just a dark, dirty janitors closet but as the story went on she started to clean it and make it more lively. I think there could be a connection to how in the beginning Melinda was dark or sad and as the year went on she started to brighten up and become a little happier. The school, which is the most used setting, wasn’t a very admired place for Melinda and also had aspects that would cause her anxiety or sadness. For example how she lost her only friend to a group in school and how she would randomly run into Andy. The least used setting is the party, but I feel is the most important because it is root of everything that happened. The party was after 8th grade and it was when Melinda was raped. She called the cops but became too afraid so she ran away. Everyone hated her because the cops came and there was underage drinking. All this lead to an unspoken secret that tears her up from the inside and all of her friends leaving