In the Novel “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson (Published by Farrar Straus Giroux in the United States on October 1999), holds a suspenseful, deep, and traumatic narrative. In this book you will be textually exposed to the true life in a teenage girl who frequently attempts to find her voice in a world full of judgement, deception, and rejection. Time and time again, Melinda Sordino, the protagonist, emotionally fights herself within her own psyche when making even the simplest of decisions in life- over thinking all possible outcomes by virtue of her constant paranoia. The many relative situations, comedic incidents, and deeply hidden messages that will move you, are compressed to an intermediate length of 197 pages.

This novel features the protagonist; a teenager girl with the name Melinda Sordino who attends a particularly peculiar high school with the typical cliques and clubs. One of these clubs includes “The Marthas”; the stuck-up, skin-deep, divas of the school. Although perceived as perfection on behalf of their looks, money, and manipulative abilities, they’re not all they seem to be, on the outside. The story takes place during the great depression in the middle of a forrest.

If the author Wilson Rawls had been shooting to either touch the reader’s heart, relate to a wide variety of people, create a suspenseful story, and willingly have someone develop an addiction to reading, then he definitely had done all the above. His from of writing in the perspective of Billy was utilized in such a manner, that you felt as if you were there to hear and see everything vividly. It was as if I were there to witness the ravishing life of a country boy living in the Great Depression with nothing but his poor family, and his two beloved dogs. The writing is evidently effective in impacting most if not all readers who are lucky enough to come passed this book in their lifetime. The vocabulary is simple yet realistic, and the dialogue surely makes the story realistic and that much more dramatic. One of the great strengths in this book was the way Rawls had described the tranquility of the forrest in the spring twilight as Billy was working around the clock to chop down the greatest tree in the Ozarks; “the Big Tree”. However not only did Rawls show his ability in describing this setting in the book, but he does it repetitively without missing a single shot. If I were asked