Speak
Melinda was crying, trying to find help at a high school party. There was a telephone in the middle of the wild high school party. The only thing she can think of is to call the cops for help. Nobody knows why she did it, so they hated her because they got in trouble for drinking beer under the age of twenty-one. That is the main part of the story that shows why she has no friends and why she doesn’t like to go to school. Speak is a novel about a girl’s life that starts out really bad and then shows that it’s possible to get people to believe you.
Since she has no friends, she is always snooping around school trying to find secret hideouts to hide in. This is all because of the night she was raped by a senior. The problem she faces is that she is scared to tell anybody, so she doesn’t get the help she needs. Instead of telling somebody she goes around with no friends, and nobody that was at the party to talk to. That is the problems in the novel Speak.
In addition from problems, there are also some motifs that play a major part in the book. First, one is the tree. In art class, she has to create a tree out of any material of her choice and they talk about it several times in the book. The other thing is the janitor’s closet. It is the place where she hides during the day so she doesn’t have to class. It becomes her safe place where she can go when she needs to rest or escape from jeopardy. Those are the two motifs that jump out at you in the story.
On the other hand, the character changes little by little throughout the story. At the beginning she was a freshman in high school, which was just trying to get through high school. Then she gets a best friend and things start to change. She starts to have fun and has somebody to talk to but she still won’t tell anybody about the night she was raped. Finally, she tells somebody, her art teacher Mr. Freeman. After that she told Rachel that her boyfriend Andy raped her. Nobody believed her. In the lunch room she built up the courage to stand up and shared the evidence to back up her story to the whole school. The character started the year as an outsider and finished it feeling better about who she is and feels confident about herself.
Finally, she has friends again and is getting help with what happened that night. It’s a happy ending for a girl that has many problems in life. She will never fully recover from the night at the party. So the lesson in the story is if you’re in trouble there is somebody out there in the world that can help you for whatever happened, so never lose hope. Melinda found help from somebody she wouldn’t have thought she would have, Mr. Freeman.
