Book Beginnings on Fridays is a meme hosted at Rose City Reader designed to feature the book you are reading right now by sharing the first few lines of the story.
Today I’m reading the much-lauded Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.
“It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, aSpeak by Laurie Halse Anderson
skirt I hate, and a stomachache.”
Despite the heavy subject matter, I’m enjoying Anderson’s sparse, stark way with words. Even divorced from the novel’s serious themes, Melinda’s voice is one that I’m sure resonates with many people recalling the drudgery of high school.
Here’s the summary, taken from Goodreads:
Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won’t talk to her, and people she doesn’t even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that’s not safe. Because there’s something she’s trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth. This extraordinary first novel has captured the imaginations of teenagers and adults across the country.
