Speak Reflections

Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, came highly recommended to me by another teacher in my building who works with struggling readers, as well as by a few of my former students. This text was indeed very engaging, and left me often wanting to read more. However, I found that there were pieces of this text that I strongly disliked along with aspects that I found to be fantastic.

To start with what I enjoyed about the text, I think that Anderson deals with the themes of vulnerability and loss of innocence very well. The confusion that Melinda feels after being raped, and the intense mental anguish and trauma that she suffers as a result of her attack, are poignant and well written. I found Melinda to be very authentic in this way – her emotional distress and withdrawn nature show the depth of how damaged she is because of her being raped. For the majority of the text, Melinda is completely withdrawn, finding herself unable to communicate herself with anyone outside of herself. We the reader are privy to her inner-monologue however, and find that at the beginning, she is not even fully open to herself. With time, and some healing, we learn much, and Melinda finds the ability to communicate more and more.

I also enjoyed Melinda’s journey of healing. In the end, when she is in the hospital (was it to get her lips stitched?) and notices the many very sick people without hope of healing, Melinda recognizes that she at least has the hope of healing from her wounds. This brings new light to her perspective, and allows the reader to see significant growth in her character.

One last quality that I really liked about Speak is its literary quality. I like the structure of the text, from one-sentence paragraphs that paralles Melinda’s feelings of isolation, to the symbolism of her sewn lips and inability to communicate. Melinda also names her art pieces the “confused period,” “spaz period,” and “dead period” to mirror her own experience. I love how Anderson played around with these details, and I find that such purposeful attention to detail in her writing makes this book appealing to a wider audience base. Students Melinda’s age can read this and engage with her character’s struggles, and a more mature reader can analyze how the text structure emphasizes what is happening in Melinda’s life.

On the other hand, there were things that drove me crazy about this text. I felt overwhelmed with teenage angst and emotion when reading this text. Yes, this is part of what makes this an authentic narrative, considering who the narrator is and what she has gone through. Still, I did not enjoy reading from her perspective. Much like Holden Caulfield annoyed the piss out of me with his “everything sucks and everyone’s a phony” attitude, Melinda’s nearly thorough misery is tiresome.

Related to this, another detail the bugged me was the art teacher. I found his character to be arrogant (in his complete disregard for his peers and superiors) an unprofessional (should not be counseling students in his Volvo – there’s a song by the Police about this same subject), and I simply did not like him. I could not take him seriously as a mentor in this text. I also found it tough to accept the resignation that the rest of the faculty seem to have with their profession – though I do recognize that we see the professionalism of these teachers through the vision of an anguished teenage girl.