Melinda Sordino's Effect On Family Life

Melinda Sordino has been influenced by peer pressure.Moreover, she has been peer pressured and doing terrible things. She experienced it quite a few times because when she was at the party she was drinking and when Melinda got to the new school called Merryweather high she ditched earned bad grades and didn't do her work in most classes. Consequently Melinda couldn't handle it that well because she didn't talk about it .She should have handled it differently by telling the people no

She didn't reveal what happened to Melinda until the end of the third marking period, you only got tidbits of what happened to Melinda during the party in the Summer. Melinda didn't even realize what had happened to her, it felt as if you were going along the story with her.

The bizarre fact regarding people, is they can be given everything necessary to live: food, water, shelter yet the way a person interacts with the world is majorly influenced by numerous other factors. Intimate relationships, such as the consistent involvement of family, is one factor that has an immense impact on how humans respond to different situations in life. Melinda Sordino, a high school student at Merryweather high, had been raped, at a party a couple weeks before freshman year. She deeply felt that nobody cared leading her to have socially distant herself from everyone and no longer putting any mindfulness into her outward appearance. Just in the matter of a few weeks, an entirely new Melinda had been fashioned without even the slightest acknowledgment or concern from her parents causing a chain of followed reactions.

In the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson the main character Melinda Sordino has a hard trying freshman year. She was raped at a party preceding the school year and hasn’t really recovered from it since. She lost all her friends after that party because she called the cops and busted the party, but told no one why-although nobody really cared to ask anyway. She lost all her friends and isolated herself from everyone while loosing her ability to speak in the process. As the school year went on her grades slipped and she periodically saw the boy that raped her which really put a dent in her already traumatized mental state. On top of that the harassment of the other students-girls and boys- got worse for example “The girl behind me jams her

Throughout the book Melinda has problems with her family. like her mom calls her weird. And is mad about her grade that just makes it worse. And her father does not communicate with her mother .So that just starts more problems with the family .

Melinda has been through a lot of things that have been able to shape her into the person she is in the book. Things like her friends, and her parents. The two factors that shaped Melinda's identity are her school life, and her home life.

There are a lot of important characters in this story, but the main one has to be Melinda herself, since the book appears to be written in diary format we follow her around for the whole book. Throughout the book you get to see Melinda and the other characters reveal their flaws just like people in real life through social interaction. Melinda is filled with guilt and shame about drinking at the party and not speaking out when a young man took advantage of her and sexually assaulted her. As the story continues she has to deal with her problems without any friends or support from her family. Her family does not see that she any problems until the principal and guidance counselor bring this to Melinda’s parents’ attention.

Melinda Sordino, a freshman at Merryweather High school in Syracuse, New York begins school off to an unwelcoming start. All of her friends now ex friends hate her and are ignoring her. She ruined an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, due to being sexually assaulted. Melinda meets a girl named Heather and become good friends. In the exposition, Melinda gets her freshman year schedule and realizes she’s dislikes almost all the teachers and also realizes she is an outcast. She is a very awkward, shy person to be around because she doesn’t know what to say ever since of the incident at the party.

Melinda warns her ex best friend, Rachel, about Andy when they start dating by writing a note. But it doesn’t help. Finally she takes all of her courage to talk to Rachel what actually happened at the party. Rachel says Melinda is a liar and walks away. However, she breaks up with Andy after that. Therefore, Andy searches for Melinda and tries to rape her again for telling Rachel the truth. Melinda screams “NNNOOO” and tries her best to fight against Andy. She doesn’t decide to be silent anymore, now she is brave enough to stand up for herself. Fortunately, lacrosse team hears the noise and comes to rescue Melinda. After that, all the students know what Andy did to Melinda and feel sorry for her. The novel ends up with Melinda choses to tell

Melinda’s room suggests that she is a girly-girl. However, Melinda explains that she went through a “demented phase” in grade 5 which led her to decorate her room that way. From that, I can infer that now she isn't really into that type of stuff. To me, Melinda seems like the kind of girl who doesn't really express her feelings because usually people decorate their rooms to reflect their personalities, likes, and dislikes. But Melinda said that her room design was mostly stolen from everyone else. She also said she doesn't know what she would want it to look like anyways which, again, hints Melinda’s lack of communication. Furthermore, on page 33, when Melinda sees Heather’s room for the first time, she thinks, “The room screams Heather.

First off, melinda has a terribly secretive past. Holding in her secret is eating her alive. She attended a end of summer party, she was irresponsible and drank too much. After a while she joined dancing with a senior ; Andy evans. At first she was fine until he asked “ do you want to?(Anderson135)” before she could answer her mouth was covered and he was rapping her. This has affected

Jacqueline lived in an overcrowded house because she had 8 sisters, however her family did not have the money to move into a bigger house. This would have affected my Nan because she may have felt very embarrassed that she was sharing a room with her sisters. The reason she would have felt embarrassed is because she would have had to dress and undress in the same room, which would of embarrassed Jacqueline because her body was changing. Also, Jacqueline was not able to have her friends stay round overnight, because there was not enough space for her friends to sleep. This would have impacted on Jacqueline’s development because she may not have had the same relationship with her friends, as her friends had with other people. For example, her

Melinda loosed the ability to communicate after she got sexually assaulted at Rachel’s party. She doesn’t tell anyone what had happened that night and bottles up her pain as she feels she would hopefully forget about it but instead it ruins her even more. Melinda tries to find other ways to express her thoughts and feelings though. For instance, she expresses her emotions through her artwork in Mr. Freeman’s class. Another way she does so is my harming herself (scratching her wrists).

Melinda is a victim of sexual assault. She will never be the same, always petrified of people touching her or attacking her. She even has small ‘fantasties’ of the horrors she faced-- even whenever she was dissecting a frog during science class, “She doesn’t say a word. She is already dead. A scream starts in my gut-- I can feel the cut, smell the dirt, leaves in my hair.” (pg.81) She is terrified, always fearful. She has become selectively mute, depressed, antisocial… She is ruined, just from this one event. It all started with a senior named Andy Evans, “Greek God: ‘Where did you come from? You’re too beautiful to hide in the dark. Come dance with me.’ He took my hand and pulled me close to him. I breathed in cologne and beer and something I couldn’t identify. I fit against his body perfectly, my head level

Melinda notices that while in the car, Heather’s mom is watching her and she feels judged. She then tries to hide herself from Heather’s mom, but continues to look at her own reflection and comes to the conclusion that “The scabs on [her] lips are especially gross in that little rectangle mirror” proving that she is slowly deteriorating inside and out following her rape (Anderson 82). Throughout the novel, she constantly bites her lips as a nervous tick and they are always bloody and scabbed. She is aware of this and how disgusting they look but cannot stop, therefore it contributes to self-destruction of her body along with her mind. In another section of the book Melinda is scrutinizing the image that stares back at her in the mirror and she “push[es] her ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand bleeding crusted lips push back” (125). Her lips are becoming irritated along with her mind. The thoughts she has about herself are twisted and always negative. She is destroying herself mentally which ultimately results in the adaptation of low self-esteem. Hart writes that, “she has little protection between her outer and inner self” proving that her thoughts are uncontrolled and lead to impulse habits that physically destroy her (Hart 264). Melinda is breaking apart, yet no one notices the subtle changes in her body that are the consequences of her self