Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is my first young adult lit. book of the semester, so I went into it excited (especially after 4 years of text books, ick). Here's a brief summary of the book:
The main character is a female freshman in high school, Melinda. The biggest change from middle school to high school is that now she has no friends; zero, zilch, nada-she's either disliked and/or ignored. She did something that basically made everyone mad at her. She had a legit reason, but it's a secret-eventually you find out, but I don't want to give too much away to my dedicated fans and blog followers. You follow her through her experience of being an outcast, depressed, and misunderstood in high school (as if it's not bad enough to begin with). While this summary and description does not do the book justice, I can say that it is definitely worth reading-one of those books you can't put down.
Anyways, I think one of the things I liked best about this book was it's combination of a compelling story that evokes a lot of emotions (anger, sadness, frustration, etc.) and also includes some humor. Also, the author does a great job of portraying the experiences of an adolescent, which I think is something really important. I guess you would say she has great perspective?
I think this book would be more suitable to hand out to females seeing as it is mostly about a girl's experience therefore making it more relatable (I don't think that's a word) to them and not so much to the guys. It's good for addressing issues of loneliness, traumatic experiences, depression, etc. However, if a student's just looking for a good read I would also recommend it to them; it's eye opening even if the reader cannot necessarily relate to the previously mentioned issues, I'm almost positive they'll know of someone at school who is a loner and it might give them something to think about.
Yay! My first book was an enjoyable success! :)
I see you've taken interest in my blog. Don't leave! I think it's of fairly decent quality. This is a project for my EDU 330 course (Young Adult Literature). Again, I reiterate, it won't be painfully boring! The picture located to the right shows approximately my level of excitement about a project that involves reading 10 young adult lit. books. I haven't read this genre in a while, so I'm anxious to get back in the game.
