Not only is she unsure of how to express what happened to others, she struggles even to wrap her own head around it. It felt very anachronistic, because other than these small cultural and technological differences, this story definitely feels like it could have been set now. In many ways, it’s these absences, these differences from what we’re used to now, that jumped out at me the most while reading. There’s no texting here, no social media-the backchannel is the toilet stall door of the girls’ bathroom. Speak has the distinction of being one of the earliest, chronologically speaking, in terms of both writing and setting. I’ve read several YA books that deal with the consequences of rape or attempted rape now. By the end of the book, I’d adapted to it, and even if it isn’t my favourite, it kind of works for how Anderson tells the story. At first I wasn’t a huge fan of this style.
We move swiftly from scene to scene, never wanting to linger too long. Melissa’s narrative voice is descriptive and eloquent yet also very succinct in how she relates events. Even her parents are stubbornly Mom and Dad. Neck, Hairwoman, Principal Principal, etc. Most of the adults in this story are not named. It matches the style of the book, though, which while not epistolary certainly feels confessional. My edition is set in block format, an interesting departure from what is conventional. As the story goes on and the school year progresses, Melinda struggles to figure out what she should feel, how she should act, while her parents and other authority figures try to figure out why she has changed. 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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