Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Being both old and rural, YA slightly passed me by. I’m of that generation that went straight from Sweet Valley High and Point Horror to Stephen King. By the time I was 18, my local library had a shelf devoted to books for 14-19 year-olds, but it appeared to be curated by somebody who’d never met one. Even when I went to Art School, Cardiff library’s YA carousels were a bizarre mix of Torchwood novelisations and Marian Keyes. Which is an extremely very long-winded way of saying that in a just world, I would have got to read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson the first time around because it would have been very much Me.

Speak is the story of Melinda, the outcast. She used to have friends but now she does not. She is slowly failing every subject. She is losing the power to Speak.

First published in 1999, Speak is a slow, thick account of Melinda’s attempts to survive a year in high school, to find her diminishing voice, and confront what was done to her at the end-of-summer party. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was later made into a film starring Kristen Stewart.

It is not really a spoiler to talk about what did happen to Melinda at the end-of-summer party – it’s what this book is known for although it is not revealed until a fair segment in. It is handled delicately enough, and the narrative manages to avoid feeling distressing, the way Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It does; it would be easy to read this and miss what Melinda is doing to herself.

I did, however, find the book fairly dated in a way that somebody like Judy Blume manages to avoid. I don’t know how well today’s teens will connect with the particular cliques of Melinda’s high school, or a world before smartphones existed and in which it doesn’t feel unusual for mobiles and internet access to not be mentioned. On top of that, the pace is slow – Melinda is getting through her days. Not a lot happens. Not a lot of choices are made.

But if YA has a cannon, this earns its place on it. Sure, the denouement is a little easy, and there are no great twists or surprises, but this does such a good job at showing the delicate balancing act of being a teen girl, and all of those things we tried to be – Melinda’s ex-friend Rachel in particular. It’s not quite as bright and melodramatic the way 18-year-old me would have wanted, but it’s solid, and it’s important, and it’s certainly worth checking out of the library.