Speak

Imagine your worst nightmare has come true; it started on devouring your insides and is going to finish you off in no time. If you don’t speak up soon about this desturbing nightmare, it will have already eaten you alive. So what’s holding you back from telling someone the truth? Telling someone all the pain you feel and all the confusion filled to the rim in your head? You don’t know who to turn to or what to say, therefore your world is nothing but a dark, doomsday, danger zone, pure disaster. The sun will never shine again until you fight the darkness and beat the odds, like Melinda the main character in the novel Speak by Laurie Anderson.
In some cases people tend to have mental breakdowns and can’t get back on track for a while. When that happens a whole weekend without talking to a friend is torturing, and a whole week without communication would be like committing suicide, and sooner or later people will stop talking to that person if they’re not giving any effort to communicate back. For example in the new Twilight movie, (The Twilight saga New Moon) Bella Swan the main character goes into a depression stage, and isolates herself from everyone. Sure enough everyone gets tired of being rejected and ignored so they stop attempting to make a conversation with her. But the difference is that Bella didn’t want to talk to anyone, and Melinda did.
So why did students at Bella’s school try to talk to her but the students at Melinda’s school wouldn’t attempt to talk to Melinda? The answer is judging a book by its cover, when kids see other people they judge them by their looks and not their personality. Melinda’s school was hooked on first look judgment and playing this huge game of “monkey see monkey do”. The problem with that is some people aren’t truly satisfied with their social life. For instance on page42 in the book, Heather wants to fit in so she join the Martha’s, a club that treats her with no respect and only keeps her to be their slave, but if she would have found a true friend she would have never had that problem.
Speak starts as a book that’s just about a depressed, scared girl with a horrific past, but in the end the author really tries to stress her opinion and persuade others to love people for who they are not their money or looks. Also that hard work pays off, Melinda didn’t just give up and stop trying to tell people the truth, she just sucked it up and had a “love me or hate me” attitude which helped her pull through the hard times.