Laurie Halse Anderson

Anderson’s timeless and important tale of high-school sexual assault and its aftermath undergoes a masterful graphic novel transformation.

Melinda, a nascent freshman, is raped at a party shortly before the beginning of school. In an attempt to report the crime, Melinda calls 911, and the party is shut down. When the semester begins, Melinda has become a pariah who spends her days silent. In addition to internalizing the emotional aspects of the assault, Melinda is relentlessly bullied by show more her peers and often runs into her attacker—a popular senior—who delights in terrorizing her. Although Anderson’s novel came out nearly 20 years ago, this raw adaptation feels current, even with contemporary teenage technological minutiae conspicuously absent. Melinda relies upon art to work as a vulnerary; this visual adaptation takes readers outside Melinda’s head and sits them alongside her, seeing what she sees and feeling the importance and power of her desire to create art and express herself. Carroll’s stark black-and-white illustrations are exquisitely rendered, capturing the mood through a perfectly calibrated lens. With the rise of women finding their voices and speaking out about sexual assault in the media, this reworking of the enduring 1999 classic should be on everyone’s radar.

Powerful, necessary, and essential. (Graphic novel. 13-adult)

-Kirkus Review show less

TW RAPE

Speak is a novel that means something very personal to me. The author managed to capture the pain and conflict that I felt myself as a sexual assault survivor. I saw myself in the Melinda and I saw the people I knew and grew up with in the other characters — including the man who assaulted her.

Reading this book felt therapeutic and healing to me. Melinda had so much more than just her voice taken away from her that night and watching her grow and trust herself into relearning how to show more use that voice to speak up for herself really allowed me the opportunity to do the same.

I truly believe this is a book that needs to be read by so many people, especially high school students so there can be conversations had about reaching out to people to see if they are in need of support and conversations had about sexual assault.

It’s not your fault. Never. Your voice will be heard show less

Trigger warning: Rape

I don’t know what to say. I loved “Speak” when I read it back in 2015. I felt for Melinda and wanted to hug her throughout the story and loved how Anderson takes a long road to showing us what happened to Melinda and how her life became unraveled before her freshman year of high school. The graphic novel does a great job with showing us Melinda in the present day and her memories of her friends and of a party that changed everything via the illustrations by Emily show more Carroll. The illustrations add so much to this story and I am glad that I read “Speak” first and then this graphic novel next. I already knew the story that Anderson was going to tell. Seeing it via another medium made it even more powerful.

“Speak: The Graphic Novel” follows the main character, Melinda. Melinda is starting her freshman year in high school and the novel quickly shows how alone she feels. She is unable to speak and as we follow her through four quarters at Merryweather High School we find out what led Melinda to lose her voice and how in the end she gets it back.

Melinda has so much pain in her and I am blown away again by the fact that her parents were this clueless. The only person that seems to be aware of Melinda is her art teacher, Mr. Freeman and a classmate of her David Petrakis. The character of Heather was self-absorbed and I cracked up at the scene we had in the novel (with Melinda telling Heather no) was done again in this with Heather’s face not processing being told no.

The writing was so good. I think that doing this novel with illustrations was actually brilliant. Considering that Melinda finds her voice again via her art and art class in school I thought it was great to see.

The graphics just made me want to go and buy this book in hardcover though.

The graphic novel shows us Melinda’s room, her secret hiding place at school, and her art classes. Everything feels tight and slightly claustrophobic.

The ending really resonates and I can’t believe this book is already 20 years old. The themes in this book made it in my mind a true classic that I can see people reading for years. show less

This is a poetic memoir in free verse that covers much of Laurie Halse Anderson's life, experiences, and strong feelings, which she uses to communicate her grief, rage, and hope, calling us all to action.

Since her book Speak was released about 25 years ago, not much has changed in the world and Laurie is furious. She returns in Shout to share her personal experiences with sexual abuse, explain some of her family's trauma, rant about how everyone said her book was a game-changer and then show more proceeded to do nothing to change the game, call to action every person who still hears these stories, believes them, and actually does want to make a change.

Anderson spotlights our failures as a society and gently loves those with the courage to shout (or whisper) their experiences into the world, with the hope that someone will listen and care. Laurie Halse Anderson still cares. We should all still care. show less