Oh Look, The Bird's Eating Again

In the interest of being honest, I found our lit circle discussion this week fairly unproductive. We seemed to go in circles for the full twenty minutes we had to talk. We at first discussed the girl herself, and one of my classmates quite loudly wondered why she didn’t just stand up for herself or tell anyone, and my response to said classmate was: “She wants to forget. Her life is falling apart at the seams and she has no clue what to do about it”. The girl in our book, Speak, is named Melinda. The summer before she started high school, she crashed a party, not telling anyone why. After that, she lost all of her friends and became a social outcast from day one of high school. Why though, doesn’t she just tell someone why? Why doesn’t she just patch things up with her friends? She just wants to escape her waking nightmare of a life, though her methods only seem to make it worse. Her parents never spend any time with each other, and slowly, Melinda realizes that her parents would have broken up a long time ago if it hadn’t been for her. This hits her hard, making her feel unwanted and a burden to her family. There’s reason one. Two, the incident over the summer has made many of her classmates feel angry, mainly because she won’t tell anyone why she called the cops. Three, she wants to forget reasons one and two. And because of these things, she slips deeper and deeper into depression and desperation until she thinks she’s going insane. She’s unsure of who she is, sometimes, she wonders if it’s not her going insane, but the rest of the world. And everything else, actually, all aspects of her life seem so surreal to her. Have you ever been the one who was shunned by everyone else? It doesn’t even have to be for the same reasons she being shunned. If you have ever been bullied like she is, you’ll understand why everything seems so unreal to her. One of my groupmates mentioned something about the book itself being badly written... when I asked why they said this, they told me that the characters were too perfect, they were too stereotypical teenager. And I asked them in turn, “have you ever been to a real high school? In a normal high school, we’d be, you’d be, the stereotypical geek. You’d meet people that these stereotypes fit like a glove.” The book isn’t the problem, what’s going on here is the simple fact that you’ve never been to a normal high school, and for your mental well-being, I hope you never do get stuck in your stereotypical high school. ASTI is definitely much better.