Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

 In junior high Melinda was a good student with lots of friends.  Three months later she starts high school as an outcast who is on her way to fail most of her classes.  Her classmates have shunned her because she called the cops on a keg party at the end of the last school year.  None of them know what really happened to Melinda at the party and she cannot find a way to tell anyone.  As she becomes more and more withdrawn, she stops speaking to most people. As an outsider she sees the emptiness of the social games at her school, and the struggles of the teachers to deal with their own lives while restraining hundreds of adolescence.  Her parents' marriage is in trouble, and they are too wrapped up in their own troubles to ask themselves why their daughter has lost interest in life. The only teacher that seems to care about Melinda and wonder what she is going through is her art teacher. Her interactions with him and the others in her art class give her the first clues about how she might start to communicate and heal.

Right now in the Alpine School District, there are several books that are being challenged by parents.  This is one that is part of the curriculum at the high school, which the parents want removed from the curriculum because they say it is "pornography".  I had a parent urge me to read part of the book that the parents find objectionable, but I decided to read the whole thing. The book came out years ago and was very controversial then, but also won tons of awards.  I didn't read it when it came out because it was YA and I was mostly reading Middle Grade back then.  As I started it this week, I was a little bit dreading it because it deals with such a heavy topic.  It was a heavy read, but really well done.  It is hard to imagine a book dealing with the rape of a 13-year-old that would be better written than this one.  Melinda is a sweet girl struggling to deal with what happened to her.  She instinctively knows she must let go of what others expect of her and do some self-care.  A reader can't help but cheer for her as she takes baby steps out of the darkness into a more hopeful future.  The scene where she finally describes what happened to her at the party had much less degree of discription than I expected. It clearly describes that she was raped, but in the most minimal prose. When I finished it I thought, "That is it? That is what all the parents are complaining about?  They must not read much."  I thought the descriptions were very age appropriate for a high school student.  

That being said, I am not sure it should be required reading in a class.  I do believe people should be able to choose their level of exposure to difficult topics.  I think it would be completely appropriate to be one of several on an approved list.  Maybe that is all the parents are asking for.  I don't know enough about the debate.  Still, I saw no reason to consider removing the book from a public library, or even for moving it from the YA section to the adult section.  (224 p. 1999)