Speak

Speak

By:

Laurie Halse Anderson

               Speak is about a fifteen year old girl that is nearly mute, depressive, and alone. High school still dances around her taunting her. She’s doesn’t really care, even though she doesn’t say much on the outside she has a lot of thoughts on the inside. Melinda is now known as the girl that doesn’t speak nor has friends; she pulls a disappearing act sometimes. She is known as the “Girl that called the cops at that last great party”.  What people don’t know is why and why is she so depressed? Last year, people knew Melinda had a friends, she talked quite a lot even if she didn’t have a say in everything. Something happened that pushed Melinda over the edge, but… what? Melinda won’t Speak.

I read a lot of books but never like this book. It kept me on the edge of my seat. I loved it. I read it more than a couple times. I am now reading it for a small group assignment. I thought that I would be completely bored with it reading it, but it was like I just read it for the first time.

This is a great book to read at school.

Tell It to Naomi

This book is about a teenage boy in high school who is struggling. He has a hot older sister in which everyone looks up to, Naomi. Everything goes wrong when his sister Naomi faxes her brother sample advice column to her ex-boyfriend/ her brother's English teacher and Newspaper Teacher. He starts writing advice to high school classmates..... This doesn't sound to bad right? But what if he's posing as his sister while writing all the advice?

A review of "Be More Chill" by Ned Vizzini

How would I describe this book? Probably as "a satirical social critique disguised as a John Greenesque high school sex comedy." With a narrative voice straight out of a Woody Allen film, Ned Vizzini tells the story of a typical neurotic teenaged schmuck named Jeremy Heere, who inhabits a very atypical plot. He, wanting to be more cool, swallows a pill called a "squip" which is a supercomputer in pill form that begins to inhabit his brain and control his life. This makes him cool, but at the same time takes a toll on his personal life. Did I like Be More Chill? That's a hard question. Often the tone of the book was too arch-snobbish for me, and the wannabe-Byron protagonist often grated, but the little complexities (e.g. the implied fact that the book is set in an alternate reality) and the dry, sarcastic sense of humor that the squip (who speaks with Jeremy throughout the entire book) itself has pushes past those small disputes I had before. Over all, Be More Chill is a flawed, but entertaining book.