"Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson Book Report.

The book I have just finished reading is called Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. The publisher of the novel is Farrar Straus Giroux and was publisher in October 1999 with 197 pages. The genre of this novel was teen fiction. The cover automatically caught my attention when I first saw it, when I started reading it nothing failed to impress me. I instantly fell in love with the storyline and the concept due to the fact that it was so relatable. In the novel they give us the impression that the setting is in modern day Syracuse. The main character and the person that tells most of the story is Melinda Sordino. In the novel she is a struggling teen that had to deal with getting raped at a party a summer before her first day of high school. At the party she ends up getting drunk and meeting another character named Andy Evans. After getting raped she panics and calls 911 and the police break into the party and they arrest some of her friends for underage drinking. That summer she lost her friends because of what she had done at the party and held grudges without knowing she had gotten raped by Andy Evans. Her grades end up getting affected tremendously and she looses who she was before getting raped, which was a happy and girly teenage girl. Throughout the novel she dresses in dull clothing and try’s to cope with the situation. At the end of the novel she finally snaps and tells her old friends what had happened and ends up as a sort of “inspiration” or hero and gains the respect of her former friends and high school and try’s to move on from that step by step. This novel definitely achieved the author’s purpose. She used different literary devices to keep me hooked to what was going to happen next. The author also used clever symbolism that also achieved the purpose. Melinda’s last name in the novel was Sordino which is “mute” in Italian. She also uses Melinda’s closet in the novel shows how she hides her feelings and emotions and wants to let it all out. The