All About Laurie

Have you ever decided to read a book that you thought was interesting, but then when you read a few pages of it, you found it boring? When this happens to many people, they decide to just give up on the book or “break up” with it and move on to the next. What some people don’t know is that the book that they have read may have actually been a good book, you just had to read more. Books that does this are those who doesn’t get read often and this is because people want excitement when they first read it.

 

From boring to interesting, Laurie Anderson’s novel “Speak” gets to every teenage kid about a girl’s life. After calling the cops at a party, Melinda Sordino goes into high school being the most hated person there. With no friends and struggling in school and with family, she shares her experiences and says why she chose not to speak.

 

“Speak” is a novel that can speak to any teenager that can relate to her. It doesn’t just tell about some girl in high school, but it tells about all teenage girls that have had trouble in high school. No matter what happened in someone’s life there would be something there that they can relate to. Melinda in this case lost her words because of a dramatic change in her life and “when people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time”. With this such change, she have let her grades go down and doesn’t talk to anyone about anything.

 

I normally loved reading books that was about teenagers and high school because I like to keep things realistic without it actually being real. Books like these catches my eye because they are something that I can closely relate to because something is always going on in a teenagers life, especially in high school. And when I read the first few chapters of this book, I thought that it was going to the first teenage book that I was going to hate but to my surprise it wasn’t.

 

While reading “Speak”, I wasn’t really up for reading it because it didn’t catch my eye. I was ready to drop it but I didn’t because as I kept reading it, I had the urge to keep going; I wanted to know what happened to Melinda. I’m glad I didn’t just “break up” with the book because I would never have known how good the book really was. The author does a good job with keeping the secret until the end because even though the beginning of the book is boring, people still read it because they want to know what happen to Melinda. It’s like knowing that a friend have a juicy secret to tell you but they won’t say anything until you do something for them or until the end of the day. And this is happening in “Speak”, the author says that something happened to Melinda, but she don’t tell what actually happened until you read the whole book.

 

When I read this book, it remind me of the book that I’ve read one day named “Sometimes It Happens” by Lauren Barnholdt. The techniques that they used where similar. Just like “Speak”, the book “Sometimes It Happens” doesn’t give up the information people want to know until the end of the book. This technique works for both of them because of the way they structured the book. They kept bringing up what people wanted to know without telling it, making the reader continue to read it to find out what they want to know.

 

“Speak” is something that I thought I wouldn’t have read because of how boring it was in the beginning. And after reading it, it goes to shows how good a book really is if it kept someone reading it to the very end especially if it was boring in the beginning.