Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
The Giver
Lois Lowry
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
YA
Contemporary YA
1999
7
6
A high-school freshman who called the police from an end-of-summer party is ostracised by everyone including her former friends, and spends the year almost entirely silent because she has never told anyone what happened to her at that party.
A girl stops speaking after a rape nobody knows about, and the school punishes her for the phone call.
A school-year novel narrated in fragments by someone who cannot say the thing the book is about.
Melinda Sordino — fourteen, funny on the page and mute in every room, with bitten lips and a closet she has claimed as a hiding place.
Andy Evans; and the school's social apparatus, which has decided she is the problem.
Character core
To be left alone, to get through the year, and to not think about August.
To say it out loud to one person, which the book treats as an achievement requiring an entire novel of preparation.
It was my fault, it was not really anything, and nobody would believe me anyway — so silence is the only option that does not make it worse.
It was rape, it was not her fault, and the silence has been protecting him. Saying it once is what makes the next time possible.
Melinda's mental health, her academic collapse, and — once Andy targets Rachel — someone else's safety.
Structure
First person present tense on Melinda, in short titled sections and lists, with a voice that is funny in a way that keeps circling and never lands.
Organised by the four marking periods of a school year, with report-card grades punctuating each. The tree Melinda is assigned in art class runs as a parallel progress bar — her drawings improve as she moves toward speech. Anderson withholds the assault itself until roughly two-thirds through, then delivers it plainly and briefly.
Before the book opens: the party, the assault, the 911 call. The novel begins on the first day of school with everyone already hating her.
Melinda writes the truth on a bathroom wall and other girls begin adding to it, which is the first evidence she is not alone and the first thing she has said in public.
Rachel refuses to believe her and calls her a liar, which confirms Melinda's worst prediction about disclosure.
Andy corners Melinda in the janitor's closet. She fights, screams, and is heard — the first time she uses her voice at full volume, and the lacrosse team hears it.
Melinda tells Mr. Freeman. The novel ends on 'Let me tell you about it', which is the first line of a story that occurs after the book.
Story beats
| Beat | Where | How it lands |
|---|---|---|
The truth told and not believed | Throughout | Melinda's one attempt at disclosure is met with disbelief from the person best placed to help. |
The group chat they get removed from | Act I | She is cut from every group before the first bell of the year. |
The teacher who takes them seriously | Throughout | Mr. Freeman takes her seriously without demanding an explanation, which is the only adult intervention that works. |
Being disbelieved | Middle | Being disbelieved is the exact outcome she predicted, and it confirms the silence. |
Standing up for someone and losing | Climax | She stands up for Rachel and pays for it before it works. |
An old wound reopened by a stranger | Throughout | Every encounter with Andy in a corridor reopens the assault without a flashback. |
The friend group's fracture point | Act I | The friend group's fracture over the 911 call is total and unexplained to anyone but the reader. |
Tropes
The ostracism is collective and social rather than a single antagonist, which is the more accurate version.
Total, immediate, and never fully repaired.
The disclosure is of a harm rather than a self, and the structure of building toward one true sentence is identical.
The tree, the closet, and the lips are metaphors Melinda constructs herself, and the book never supernaturalises them.
Present, employed, and entirely unable to see what is happening in their own house.
What Melinda is mourning is the year before, and she cannot name the loss to anyone.
Craft notes
Anderson's central formal choice is that the narrator's voice is vivid and constant on the page while she is silent in every scene. The gap between the interior wit and the exterior muteness is the book's entire emotional mechanism. If your character cannot speak, let the reader hear everything they are not saying.
Issue fiction usually supplies an adult who notices and intervenes. Here the adults are variously oblivious, punitive, and well-meaning-but-useless, and Mr. Freeman helps only by giving Melinda a non-verbal channel and refusing to push. Restraint from the adult characters is what keeps the book from becoming a pamphlet.
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