“We have to acknowledge that adolescence is that time of transition where we begin to introduce to children that life isn’t pretty, that there are difficult things, there are hard situations, it’s not fair. Bad things happen to good people.”
Laurie Halse Anderson
Analysis
Laurie Halsie Anderson struggled to read when she was young. She remembers learning to write haikus in second grade as a watershed moment where she knew she was capable of writing. I think haiku writing may be why her texts are sparse yet meaningful. She tells of relishing her dad’s storytelling and humor. Even in the darkness of her subject matter of a rape in Speak, her protagonist has laugh-out-loud observations.
I agree with Anderson’s quote above of teaching and dealing with when bad things happen to good people. Speak not only deals with rape but the high school educational experience. The text is structured in four parts labeled as marking periods. Her views on the worthiness of individual classes like biology, gym, and English are questioned and discussed negatively throughout. She really trashes the lessons on symbolism in the Scarlet Letter. Anderson says she chose to live on a pig farm to escape high school herself.
In her most recent interview, Anderson believes illiteracy is due to children being “force-fed books that do not relate to them [and come to] view books as shameful, ugly and horrible instead of enlightening and wonderful.” She has devoted much of her life creating YA books that are responsive to what adolescents have shared with her about “their pains and joys.”
Lessons for this novel abound on the Internet. Here are some I recommend (not included on my works cited page):
Site Title 