The Tree Project That Wrecked an Entire Class

The first day of high school, and the girl nobody will sit with

Here’s the setup, stripped down: Melinda Sordino starts ninth grade as a pariah. She called the cops on an end-of-summer party, the party got busted, and now every kid in Merryweather High hates her for it. Nobody knows why she made the call. Melinda isn’t telling. She barely talks to her parents, barely talks to her ex-best-friend Rachel who’s now icing her out in the hallway, barely talks to anyone except, eventually, a tree.

That’s not a metaphor I’m being cute about, by the way. Melinda gets assigned a year-long art project: pick one object and render it in every medium until you understand it. She picks a tree. Watching her hack away at linoleum block prints and clay lumps that all come out wrong, and slowly, slowly getting closer to something true, is basically the whole emotional spine of the book disguised as an art class subplot. Mr. Freeman, her art teacher, is one of maybe two adults in this book who actually sees her, and Anderson doesn’t oversell that. He just keeps showing up.

You know from the opening pages that something happened at that party. You don’t get the full picture until deep in, and I’m not going to spoil the mechanics of the reveal because the slow reveal is the whole engine of the book. What I’ll say is that this isn’t a mystery in the plotty sense. It’s a mystery in the sense of watching someone circle their own trauma for three hundred pages because getting close enough to name it might kill her.

What actually works, and the one thing that doesn’t

The voice is the whole show. First person, present-tense-adjacent, sardonic in exactly the way a smart kid gets sardonic when she’s protecting something. Melinda renames her high school cliques with the specific cruelty only a teenager could manage (the Marthas, the cheerleaders, the “clove smokers”), and that humor is doing real work: it’s armor. You laugh, and then two pages later you’re gut punched, and Anderson never once tells you that’s what she’s doing. She just does it.

The lunchroom scenes are some of the best writing about adolescent social exile I’ve ever read. Melinda wandering the cafeteria with a tray, calculating where she can sit without anyone visibly flinching, landing finally with a rotating cast of kids who don’t quite reject her but don’t include her either. I remember reading that section on a bus and feeling my stomach actually drop, because I had done exactly that math, at exactly that age, for entirely different reasons.

Here’s the thing though. I don’t think the ending fully earns its catharsis. The confrontation and the after feel a little compressed, a little neat, considering how patiently and unbearably slow the rest of the book let Melinda’s silence build. I get why Anderson did it this way, a YA novel from 1999 wasn’t going to sit in that wreckage forever without offering the reader a way up for air. But some part of me, even at fourteen, felt the last twenty pages moving faster than the emotional truth of the book had earned. That’s my one real complaint, and it’s not nothing, but it also doesn’t undo what came before it.

I’ll admit I question my own attachment to this book sometimes. I reread it a few years ago as an adult and wondered if it would read as dated, or as a “very special episode” kind of YA problem novel, the kind that gets assigned in school and immediately resented for being assigned. It didn’t. If anything the restraint held up better than I expected. Anderson never spells out the word. She makes you sit with Melinda’s inability to say it, which is a much harder and much better choice than melodrama would have been.

Speak is a book about a girl who can’t say the worst thing that ever happened to her, and it makes you understand, physically, why silence can feel safer than the truth.

About Laurie Halse Anderson

Anderson wrote Speak after years of freelance journalism and picture books, and it’s wild to think this was still relatively early in her career as a novelist. She’s since written a memoir, Shout, in verse, that goes directly at her own history of sexual assault and essentially confirms what a lot of readers already suspected: this book came from somewhere real. She’s also written historical fiction (the Seeds of America trilogy) that gets less internet buzz but is genuinely excellent and rigorously researched. She’s been a fixture at banned-book panels for two decades now, mostly because Speak keeps getting challenged in school districts for the assault content, which is its own grim irony given what the book is actually about.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, for another quiet narrator circling something he can’t quite say out loud yet.
• Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson, the memoir in verse that reads like the nonfiction echo of Melinda’s silence finally breaking.
• All the Rage by Courtney Summers, angrier and louder where Speak is quiet, same wound, different register.
• The Way I Used to Be by Amber Smith, if you want to sit longer in the aftermath than Speak’s compressed ending allows.

For your book club

1. Why do you think Anderson chose to withhold what happened at the party for so long, and did that choice make you more or less patient with Melinda as a narrator?
2. What is the tree project actually doing in this book, structurally and emotionally, beyond just being a school assignment?
3. Mr. Freeman is one of the only adults who seems to notice Melinda. Why do you think the other adults, including her parents, miss it so completely?
4. Did the ending feel earned to you, or too quick given how slowly the rest of the book moved?
5. Speak is still one of the most banned books in American schools. What do you think that says about the discomfort adults have with this specific story, versus other YA content?