Brief Summary Of The Novel 'Speak' By Laurie Anderson

Speak is a short 208 page novel focusing around a highschool girl named Melinda Sordino, a school outcast who doesn't speak at all. She lost all of her friends after she broke up a party that had occurred over the previous summer by calling the police. Now in high school she is completely isolated and never speaks, though since the book is from her perspective we see that her internal personality is sarcastic and slightly rude. On the first day a girl named Heather attempts to speak to her but she doesn't pay much attention to her. When Melinda went to art class she found that she enjoyed it because of the teacher Mr. Freeman, whom had all the students draw a word out of a broken globe to serve as inspiration over the semester, Melinda picks the word tree. Heather tries to be friends with Melinda but she also wishes to be popular, a goal which Melinda is very interested in. Over the course of the book Melinda reveals her struggles with school, and reflects on her past social life in which she had a nice group of friends. Heather continues to attempt to become popular, even getting on a trial basis to join ‘The Martha's’ an exclusive group. It is around this time that Melinda sees a person who she refers as to as ‘It’. ‘It’ later known as ‘The Monster’ terrifies Melinda to the point of her being
Though Melinda her has shown a light on a topic that many authors would be too afraid to put in a young adult novel and for this and it's amazing but realistic writing the book Speak was a finalist for the National Book Award. Due to its success and powerful message, Speak was re-published with a minor change: in the beginning of the book was a poem, constructed from over a thousand emails from girls and boys like Melinda. This poem is meant to show how many lives Speak has changed and how many people Melinda has inspired to speak