This organization suits the content perfectly because most of the action, most of Melinda’s torment, happens at school. Like the original novel, the graphic novel is divided into four sections surrounding the school’s four grading terms. The panels are irregularly shaped and without pattern, again mirroring Melinda’s disorganized, emotional state as she spirals towards an inevitable crisis. The font size often mirrors Melinda’s pain, at times screaming her distress in extra large font at other times a tiny, thin script whispers her fears. She is hunched over with deep, dark shadows under fear-filled eyes. Carroll depicts Melinda as haunted and hunted. This year, Anderson has teamed up with artist Emily Carroll to create a stunning graphic novel version of Speak.Īnderson has boiled the original text down to bare necessity, making room for Carroll’s evocative black, white and grey images to fill in the details. But in 1999, when Speak was first published, it was cutting edge literature, making its way to the top of both high school recommended reading lists and banned book lists.

The #MeToo movement and even the election of Donald Trump have moved rape culture and sexual assault to the front of the conversation, and many excellent YA novels now explore this theme. It is this gritty realism that made the original version of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak a worldwide success. Instead, she has shut down, barely speaks at all, and is on her way to a lonely, angry hell where only she knows the truth. In an authentic rendering of victim behavior, we realize that Melinda has not disclosed the sexual assault to anyone. It isn’t until the middle of the novel that we piece together the whole story. Melinda does what she’s been taught to do when something bad happens: she calls 911.īut on the first day of school, the point at which the novel begins, we see that Melinda has become a social pariah, physically and emotionally abused by her classmates because she called the cops and ruined the party. One night at an end-of-summer party, 14-year-old Melinda Sordino is raped by a high school senior.

New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books), 2018.Ĩ00 girls in this school and he finds me.

Speak graphic novel