Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson Summary

Freshman year is said to be the toughest year of high school, for some more than others. Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is a story of a girl whose first year of high school does not go exactly how she thought. She had lots of friends and an almost perfect life. Her and her friends end up going to a high school party the summer before she started high school and everything changed because of what happened that night. Laurie Halse Anderson writes short stories and novels for children and young adults. Anderson was born in 1961 in New York. She still lives in New York with her husband and kids. She went to Denmark as an exchange student in her senior year of high school. She got her associate’s degree at Onondaga Community College and her bachelor’s degree at Georgetown University in 1984. Anderson started working as a …show more content…
The novel begins on her first day of high school. She is a very quiet, almost mute girl. She wasn't always like this. She becomes “mute” after a end-of-summer party. She is raped at this party and calls the 911 for help, but when they answer her call she says nothing. This is the start to her silence. From this day on, until the end of the story, she rarely talks only when she has to. Because she got the party busted, she looses all her friends. She is known all over the school for what she did, but no one knows the real reason why she did it. She befriends a new girl named Heather but she doesn’t really understand Melinda very well so it ends up not lasting very long. The only character in the whole book that seems to understand she is the art teacher, Mr.Freeman. She takes refuge in an abandoned janitors closet. This is her safe place, where she goes to escape the world. It's the only place she feels like she is safe from the work. At the beginning she is very reserved and mute. The whole story is her inner monologue. By the end she seems to have come out of her

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