Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson Analysis

Speak The book I am responding to is called Speak written by Laurie Halse Anderson. This book is about a teenage girl named Melinda Sordino, who begins her high school year with a big secret. Over the summer she and her friends went to a party where Melinda was raped, she called the police, causing her friends and everyone at the party to reject her. Later Melinda befriends a girl named Heather, a new student at her school.

Book report I've read the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. The book is about the teenage girl Melinda, who has just started Merryweather High. She knew from the beginning that she wouldn't fit in, that she wouldn't be one of the popular girls. Every one hates her after what happened during summer, her previous friends don't want to know nothing about Melinda anymore and the rumours about her aren't so positive either. She will forever be the girl who called the police in the middle of the party and no one bothered to look up the reason behind the call.

44 percent of rapes are people who are under 18, what if you were in the 44 percent? That's what the book “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson depicts. In this book a girl named Melinda was drunk and got raped at a back to school party. And all she can do is think to call the police for help, but she doesn't realize that she is about to get almost everyone in there school busted for drinking. Everyone finds out she called the police at the party and everyone neglects and hates her for getting them in trouble.

High school. It's a scary thought. Being prepared for things can be hard. Especially the changes that happened within one's identity. Imagine something terrible happened the summer before high school.

The Cruelties of Silence Have you ever seen someone sitting alone in the school cafeteria during lunch, and wonder why that person was alone? Were they waiting for their friends? Were they new? Were they studying? None of these explanations were why Melinda, the main character of the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson was sitting alone during lunch.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson was a surprisingly explosive novel, and was not something that I was expecting. The novel initially begins with the introduction of a young girl named Melinda, roughly aged thirteen or fourteen, as she had just began high school as a freshman. However we get this introduction of her character not by dialogue as most books do, but simply by Melinda's thoughts and narration. In fact, throughout the novel, rarely does Melinda speak aloud, which I felt added a great ironic effect to the title. Why does she not like to speak?

"No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.” Maya Angelou. In Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson this is shown through, Melinda Sordino, a freshman, starts high school with no friends because she called the police at a summer party after being raped. As she struggles through her first year of high school, she realizes that in order to grow, she must find her voice, which she eventually does, and things start to look better for her. Anderson uses the mouth as a motif to trace Melinda’s personal growth throughout the book from depressed and not speaking to coming out of her depression and speaking again.

“Whenever the memory of those Marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded. I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence,illusions as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now. Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in a multicolored skein of 14-going-on-15 as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more women than child, years ago in Miss.Lottie’s yard.” Both of these examples go to show that little things can have much more meaning than what materialistic things seen, but that they can have strong emotional ties to a person who views them in a different way. When Lizabeth comprehends this topic it leads towards her gain in

This is accomplished through the new haircuts that Edward provided which gave everyone a unique and different look to one another. When Edward cuts Joyce’s hair, the scene is taken from a low angle which made Edward appear in total control while Joyce appears completely vulnerable. This shows that that they did not view Edward as a threat but instead the community appreciated his talents. Not only has their appearances changed but Edward also made beautiful and creative sculptures out of the perfectly trimmed hedges which gave each house its own appeal. Edward’s passion for sculpting represents his inner beauty and creativity which shows that he is capable of creating beauty out of something that has a simple structure.

This quote shows that even though Mairs sometimes has difficulty accepting her illness, she knows that there is a growing acceptance of people who must deal with the difficulties that she faces. This ultimately lends a hopeful and positive tone to an otherwise serious and depressing section of her essay. This contrast in tone, but general feeling of hope is key to the type of emotions that Nancy Mairs is trying to educate her readers about. Mair is successful in using multiple rhetorical strategies to connect with the reader.

In this passage of James Weldon Johnson's novel reflects on his youth and his infatuation with an older girl from his church. Through the use of literary elements, such as imagery and symbolism, Johnson conveys the narrator's complex response to his crush and the emotions that it inspires in him. One of the literary elements that Johnson employs in this passage is imagery. The narrator uses vivid descriptions to convey the physical appearance of the girl, creating an almost ethereal image of her in the process.

Short Writing Assignment: Explaining IT to My Teacher In the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, the main protagonist, Melinda, stated that she hates “IT”. Although we don’t know who the person “IT” is, I predict that “IT” is an outgoing, and untrustworthy person. Here are some reasons why.

The book Speak is a book written by Laurie Halse Anderson, it is about a young girl named Melinda Sordino and is about a very serious and all too common issue: rape and depression. Rape is a serious problem, it can completely destroy a person, making them never the same again. Depression is always an uphill battle and is even worse when your friends turn their back on you and your family does not notice something is seriously wrong with you. Melinda was a young girl enjoying life until an older boy named Andy Evans took advantage of his size and raped her.

Another element in this novel is Melinda’s inner conflict, man vs. self. What Melinda has been through greatly affected her everyday life. She struggles with depression, dislikes her appearance, and feels ashamed of herself for something that isn 't her fault: “I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else...even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me” (Anderson 51). Andy Evans, the senior who raped her, made her feel worthless. This situation is much like the one in the novel The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

She was not contented with the banal and basic Gerald and it did not match the standards of Kat. She took advantage of Gerald, as he was like “blank paper”(38), and painted him into her image: the sexy and elegant Ger. Though Ger fit the image of Kat, she still was not pleased and she longed for someone else, she thought to herself, “Gerald is what [I’ve] been missing… Not Ger, not the one [I’ve] made in [my] own image. ”(41) She yearned for the same Gerald she originally changed into her image.