Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll

I have to admit, I've never read Speak. I'm aware of it, of course; you can't work in children's books and not know it at least by reputation. But I wasn't reading YA when it came out first, and when I started working there were so many new titles it always slipped by. If all this version did was give me a chance to read it, I'd be grateful for just that much.




However, that's not all it is. This is an amazing and occasionally terrifying version of an excellent story. The original must be very difficult to read; the visual representations here are difficult enough. Scenes where Melinda is imagining people melted, faceless, or as huge, threatening trees made me want to skip past, at the same time as I wanted to slow down and absorb every detail. The illustrations are amazing.

I do have one small nit; in a couple of places, the writing is black on dark backgrounds, which pulled me out of the story a bit as I tried to figure out what was happening. Apart from that, though, this is an amazing, fantastic read and I will definitely come back to it again.

"Speak up for yourself-we want to know what you have to say." 

From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless--an outcast--because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. Through her work on an art project, she is finally able to face what really happened that night: She was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her.