Laurie Halse Anderson Characters

The novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is a very good book. The characters are very well developed and change throughout the course of the book, including learning an extremely important moral with which many people agree. There are many dynamic characters, including Melinda, Heather, Rachel, Melinda’s parents, and Andy. By the end of the book, Melinda learns an important lesson about being able to speak up for yourself. Between this important moral, well-developed characters, and many other factors, Speak is an amazing novel. Multiple characters change throughout the course of the book. The most important of the dynamic characters is Melinda, seeing as she is the protagonist. In the beginning of the book, Melinda goes to school terrified
The characters are developed so well. Psychological thrillers, such as Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, can be hard to write, because the reader almost always has to know what the characters are thinking, and this has to be done while developing a plot. There was nothing in particular that I didn’t enjoy about the book. The final confrontation with Andy was climactic, despite my expectations of an anticlimactic ending like what usually occurs in books read for school. Anderson even developed Andy well enough that when Melinda was holding a piece of glass to his neck, I didn’t want her to kill him, despite his having raped her. In the aftermath of this confrontation, Melinda’s goal is to finish her tree before the school year ends. One girl sees her and congratulates her on defeating Andy. Melinda finishes the tree, and recognizes the fact that it is perfect because of its imperfections. This is an amazingly written ending, and a great conclusion to a great novel. Most loose ends are tied up, and the ones that aren’t resolved, such as Rachel calling Melinda after the fight, were supposed to be left for interpretation. The ending was satisfying, and not simply because it had a happy ending. The ending satisfies because it was realistic. Anderson could have simply written that Rachel believed Melinda when she was initially told that Andy raped Melinda, and then everything ends happily ever after. Instead, Rachel is infuriated, the same way a real teenager would, and is in denial, which is a natural human response to negative emotions. The fight is also realistic, because Melinda legitimately defeats Andy on her own without any form of dumb luck. This was an amazingly written