Review – Speak

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

From the back cover –

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so her old friends won’t talk to her, and people she doesn’t know hate her from a distance.  The safest place is to be alone, inside her own head.  But even that’s not safe.  Because there’s something she’s trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens.  And then she would have to speak the truth.

My thoughts –

Like other bloggers have said about this book in the past, it’s a difficult book to say anything about because the main element to the story is something that’s hidden from the reader from the beginning and not revealed until close to the end of the book.  The great majority of this YA novel consists of Melinda’s thoughts and feelings as she goes through her freshman year of high school a complete outcast.  Obviously, as the summary implies, there’s something very big that caused Melinda to become such an outcast, but this something is a secret she’s keeping from everyone, her old friends, parents, teachers, even her guidance counselor.  Personally, I figured out what that “something” was pretty easily but I have no plans to give it away to anyone who hasn’t read the book yet or wouldn’t be able to guess on their own.  Speak is a very engrossing read, Melinda is a painfully real teenager, and above all else, this is a really great book for teens because I think it portrays the way things can happen in high school very well.  I enjoyed it a lot, and best of all, it’s about 200 pages so I was able to read the entire thing in an afternoon!

9 stars.

Read Trish’s review here, Susan’s review here, Muerta’s review here, Jeane’s review here, Stephanie’s review here, and Becky’s review here.