After writing Carnaby, and discovering it was a Young Adult novel, I set myself to learning about the YA genre, since I apparently belonged there, and I came across this novel: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and it is one of the very best books I’ve ever read, although I’m an Adult, and not particularly Y, at that.
In Speak, Melinda tells us about her life. There is nothing, at least at first sight, extraordinary about her life. She goes to school, where she has few friends, her grades are falling, at home her parents are too busy with their own lives to talk to her or each other, she observes the seasons, and the decay of the old and the growth of the new…. So far, nice enough. But why have her friends ostracised her? And why does she chew her lips so hard that they are scabbed with dried blood, and why does she start to find it hard to say anything at all…. why is she losing her voice as her friendships and ambitions all collapse around her? The dark secret at the heart of Melina’s story is not so nice, after all.
And why do we care why Melinda chews her lips? Why do we care that no one in her world, except her art teacher, seems to care? We care because Melinda is funny and she feels like we’ve all felt at some times in our lives. We step right into her shoes, and even for someone like me, for whom 14 years old is a distant memory, we feel at home in her shoes, although at home is not always a comfortable place to be.
This book is a rebuke to those of us who feel we need bombs going off, or dead bodies (guilty as charged) to create tension. Speak is beautifully paced, and I couldn’t put it down until I had read to the last word. When a book feels so true, it doesn’t have to play games.