2 reviews found

Reading this book was a surreal experience in a few ways. I read a lot of contemporary YA, so I’m used to feeling a lot older than the characters. Speak was originally published in 1999, when I was ten years old. So I was younger than Melinda when this book first came out, and the high school setting actually predates my own high school experience. Yet I’m older than her now, when I read it.…

This was a difficult book to read, and not just because of its subject matter. Laurie Halse Anderson’s writing is highly stylized in Wintergirls; I mistook the cover copy’s description of her writing as “lyrical” as being metaphorical, but it’s more accurate than not. Normally I dislike gimmicky or unconventional experiments in narrative style, even when they attempt to bring verisimilitude to a narrator’s stream of consciousness. For some reason, though, it seized me…