Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
“A girl who cannot speak the truth is drowning in it — and only an art project about trees will teach her how to breathe again.”
At a Glance
Ninth-grader Melinda Sordino begins high school utterly alone: she called the police at a summer party and no one knows why, which cost her every friend she had. She stops speaking, stops caring, and retreats into a closet she converts into a hiding place. Through her art class — where she's assigned 'tree' as a yearlong project — she slowly discovers a language she can use. By spring, the truth finally surfaces: she was raped at that party by a senior named Andy Evans. Speaking it aloud, even to herself, is what saves her.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Speak was one of the first YA novels to address sexual assault directly, from a survivor's perspective, without flinching, without punishing its protagonist for what happened to her, and without requiring her to report to authorities or achieve legal justice. Published in 1999, it arrived in a cultural moment with almost no other books doing this work for teenage readers. It became one of the most-assigned YA novels in American middle and high schools and one of the most-challenged. Anderson has received more letters from survivors than she can count.
Diction Profile
Deliberately informal — sentence fragments, dry humor, present tense intrusions. Melinda's voice is the voice of someone who has turned irony into body armor.
Moderate but precise