expository essay

Expository Essay

Owen Hubner

Imagine if you were the most hated, unpopular person at your school. Everybody, including all your friends from the year before despise you because of something over the summer that you cant bring yourself to tell anyone. If you can imagine that, then you know how Melinda feels in Speak. Melinda has almost everybody against her. With the help of a new friend and her art teacher, she brings up the strength to tell everybody the truth.

Its the first day of school for Melinda. She has “seven notebooks, a skirt she hates, and a stomachache”. It sets a slightly negative setting for the reader. She finds her friends from the year before, they all loath her. It's hard for anybody to bear losing all your friends at the same time. The only good thing she finds at school is her art class. I cant imagine how hard it must be to go to school everyday with no friends and only one class to look forward to. It must be horrible.

Melinda is constantly feeling down and is always very hard on herself. From her perspective it seems like everything sucks and the entire world is out to get her. Her new friend Heather stopped being friends with her a because Melinda is always depressed and is no fun. On top of that, she keeps messing up her art project, art being her only strong subject. I think, in a way, that brought her down even more but in another way it fuelled her determination to speak the truth about what happened over the summer and about Andy Evans.

The book does end with a happy ending for Melinda. She really changes towards the end. When Andy Evans tries to 'abuse' Melinda again she finds the strength to say no and even threatens Andy. Her art project is finally finished and her art teacher loves it and is very proud of her. This has a big impact on Melinda and finishes the story with a happy ending at the end of Melinda's school year. Her attitude now compared to the beginning of the year is like night and day. What happens the year after is left up to interpretation, but I can only assume she makes new friends and re-unites with old ones. Things will go back to the way they were before.

Thanks to her friend Heather and her art teacher, she found the courage to speak up and tell everyone the truth. The cool thing about this book is that any teenager that reads it could probably relate to it one way or another. The change in her is inspiring and shows that even where there seems to be nothing but darkness and depression, there is hope. Hope is what dives us all, without hope we are alone, and helpless. Never lose hope, even if its the only thing you have left.