by Laurie Halse Anderson. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1999. 198p.
As the reader is introduced to Melinda, she’s starting her first year of high school. Her middle school friends now look at her with loathing and refuse to acknowledge her. Before school started, she and her best friend Rachel were at a senior party and Melinda called the cops. Now she must learn how to face a school full of hostile students without being able to tell anyone the real reason she called.
The reader is left in the dark with the rest of Melinda’s friends an classmates for a large portion of the narrative as she meets a new girl named Heather who will do anything to fit in. Melinda’s grades begin to slip and every moment in school feels like torture except art class with Mr. Freeman. Her assignment for the year is to explore the tree as an object and to make it come to life. Melinda feels dark and dead inside, and wonders how on earth she’ll be able to breathe life into an inanimate drawing.
Her parents seem disinterested in Melinda’s evident pain except to harass her about not communicating and about slacking off in school. Her mother works endlessly at the department store she manages, and her father is a business man. Melinda is alone a lot and doesn’t feel comfortable even in her own home so she creates a tiny sanctuary in an abandoned janitor’s closet at school, decorating it with her art projects. Slowly, clues to Melinda’s secret begin to emerge as she thinks back to that night and after she encounters IT at school. IT happens to be Andy Beast, a last name that is surely fitting, given his crime. In flashback, Anderson details Melinda’s rape and her guilt over having been drunk and unable to fight him off. It isn’t until Andy begins pursuing her former best friend Rachel that Melinda feels the need to tell what happened to her.
She begins small, by writing on the bathroom stall wall: “Guys to stay away from: Andy Beast.” She is encouraged later when she sees that others have agreed and started a dialogue about his many mal-doings. When she confesses the truth to Rachel through notes passed in the library, Rachel yells and assumes she must be jealous of a freshman getting to go to the prom with such a hot senior. Meanwhile, Melinda has begun to thaw with the Syracuse spring, planting marigolds and thinking about redecorating her room to feel more like home. After prom, Melinda hears that Rachel confronted Andy and ditched him for someone else.
Near the end of school, Melinda is cleaning out her janitor closet sanctuary when Andy confronts her about telling everyone. He locks the closet door and attacks her. Melinda fights back this time, pressing a shard of broken glass to Andy’s neck. After the girl’s lacrosse team witnesses this, Melinda’s story is soon all over school, and this time people are giving her the thumbs up. Melinda finally finishes her tree project by drawing a tree that is like her, damaged in some places, but real and continuing to grow. She finally confides the whole story in her sympathetic and supportive art teacher.
Anderson’s narrative style excels at the difficult task of giving Melinda a voice for the reader without giving her one in the life of the story. She relates the storyline through Melinda’s thoughts and the action around her, with almost no dialogue. Her sentence structure is sometimes long and cumbersome like the stream of adolescent thoughts, or choppy to relate emotion. These devices, along with the striking cover of a face behind a branch with the mouth covered serve to give the reader insight into the mind of someone who has been hurt and has bottled up those emotions. The reader feels her frustration and teens may identify with her desperation to remain silent or wonder why on earth her parents didn’t notice and try to help her. This is a powerful and unique perspective on the topic of rape but also one of strength and growth. I would rank this a 5Q and a 4P on the VOYA scale and recommend it to Junior Middle and High school students. Readers will not soon forget what it felt like to be silenced in Melinda’s story.
