![]() ![]() She pretends to like it that way, but secretly she feels broken. Abandoned by her former friends because they think she called the cops to the party for no reason, Melinda walks the halls of Merryweather High alone. Melinda’s initial coping strategy after this trauma is to withdraw and stop talking any more than is absolutely necessary. We don’t learn this right away, of course, although anyone who is paying attention will connect the dots fairly soon. ![]() Speak is Melinda’s first-person journey through depression and self-loathing after she was raped at a party the summer before Grade 9. Trigger warnings include discussion of rape and at least one scene with some racism. Yet I’m older than her now, when I read it. So I was younger than Melinda when this book first came out, and the high school setting actually predates my own high school experience. Speak was originally published in 1999, when I was ten years old. I read a lot of contemporary YA, so I’m used to feeling a lot older than the characters. Reading this book was a surreal experience in a few ways. ![]()
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