Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson the author of the book Speak speaks through a young girl who has no friends and suffers through desperation as a freshman in high school. Anderson is well known for children and young adult books and has even earned the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2009 and was recognized after writing the book Speak in 1999. “Laurie Halse Anderson was born on October 23, 1961 in Potsdam, New York where she loved the fact that they lived near Canada.” As a child she showed of her impressive righting skills especially with haikus in the second grade. But other than that she was tribal in math and as a teenager she didn’t really dream of being a writer but a doctor. Even though that she had dreams of being a doctor her grades in Biology and Chemistry could not live up to such a demand. Anderson not only was interested…

Art gives people who cannot “Speak” a chance to express their own voice and speak to the world. Laurie Halse Anderson, in writing Speak, gives kids hope that there always is someone there to help. Melinda expresses her deep emotion that she doesn’t show anyone, without trying to in her artwork. “I see a girl caught in the remains of a holiday gone bad, with her flesh picked off day after day as the carcass dries out.” Pg.64 Mr. Freeman said this to Melinda after looking at her turkey bones…

Silence is uncommon today when sharing what is on everyone’s mind is just a click away. Malala Yousafzai expresses that, “We realize the importance of our voice only when we are silenced.” Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson follows the freshman year after the rape of Melinda Sordino who struggles between keeping her mouth shut and using her voice against her attacker. The novel explores the crippling power of being voiceless to illustrate the importance of speaking up. Melinda demonstrates the…

The book “Speak,” by Laurie Halse Anderson, is about a girl named Melinda Sordino who is starting her freshman year in high school. She’s had something horrible done to her, however, she won’t tell anyone what happened. During a party before school starts, a junior named Andy Evans raped her. When she calls the police, but she can’t bring herself to tell them what happened. During her phone call with the police, another person sees her and all her friends and everyone at the party begins to hate…

“Control”, this piece of artwork, illustrates how the protagonist of Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, feels and sees the world after she was raped and abused. Both the issue of bullying and sexual abuse in Speak are worldwide issues that affect people on a daily basis, and need to be prevented.The words in blue are her thoughts as she tries to decipher if she was raped last summer when she blacked out at a party, and if she should tell her parents what happened to her. The words in red are the…

The book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is about Melinda Sordino, a ninth-grader in Merryweather High School in Syracuse, New York. From the outside, she might have looked like an ordinary girl, but inside she held a secret that had withdrawn her to a life of silence and melancholy. She had gone through a traumatizing event that had changed her whole life to the point where she had lost all hope and became self-destructive. Melinda was raped by Andy Evans, a senior, at a party before the start…

Undeniably, the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is an interesting yet enlightening read about a girl named Melinda Sordino who faces depression after a traumatic incident. There are multiple settings, but there are two major ones. The story mostly takes place at the MerryWeather High School. This is a place where Melinda fears to be at because she can run into Andy Evans, the boy who raped her at the summer party that left her devastated. The next setting is at Kyle Rodger’s party, this is…

Melinda’s surrounding of people creates her fears of speaking out about her rape case. At the beginning of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, the freshmen are gathered up together in the auditorium, where she see’s her ex-best friend, Rachel, “This was the girl who suffered through Brownies with me... If there is anyone in the entire galaxy I am dying to tell what really happened, it’s Rachel. My throat burns. Her eyes meet mine for a second. “I hate you,” she mouths silently. She turns her back to…

The novel Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, mainly describes about Melinda's trial in her high school. Before Melinda's first year of her high school, she went to the party with her friends. At the party, she drinks three beers because of her excitement even though she barely had any experience with alcohol. Andy Evans who is a senior boy approaches to Melinda and rape her. After the rape, Melinda quickly calls the police, but she cannot tell what happen to her. Other students think Melinda is…

small incident altering their lives. For the unlucky few who have their lives changed negatively, it is always hard. Weather it is winning a lottery ticket or not getting a job that was worked so hard for, it changes the course of a person’s plans. The classic novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne shows a prime example of how one’s mistake, set in the seventeenth century, alters a woman 's life dramatically. The contemporary novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson also take a look at what…