The significance behind the title Speak

I read the book called Speak. I believe that the significance of the title is that you should simply speak. There’s a young girl going into her freshman year, and she and her best friend went to a party. They were drinking and a cute senior boy came up behind her and started to kiss her. Then he took her up to this bedroom and began to take advantage of her. She was in complete shock and didn’t know what to do after all she was only fourteen. After he was done he got up and left, she then went downstairs and she didn’t know what to do so she called the cops. Someone close by her saw that she was on the phone so they grabbed the phone from her ear and saw that she had called 911, that person yelled the cops are coming. Someone punched the girl who called the cops in the face, and then everyone started to run all over the place as quick as they could to get out of there before the cops showed up. She and her best friend were no longer friends anymore; no one wanted to talk to her after the party because no one knew why she called the cops. So she spent the whole summer alone. When school started back up again no one was still talking to her except a new girl, that hadn’t heard about the incident. She never told anyone because she thought it was her fault. However, towards the end of the book she tells someone, and she realizes it’s not her fault. So I guess the reason the author title this book Speak was for simply the reason that it’s never too late to speak up and your always ashamed of what happened and scared of how people are going to judge you, but in all reality it feels way better to actually speak up.

Wintergirls

I liked this text because I could relate to a lot of things that were going on. Lia is the main character and she has been battling an eating disorder for a very long time now. When reading the book Wintergirls, I compare myself to Lia a lot. I also am always concerned about my weight. My sophomore year of high school I was what I would consider overweight. It wasn't until I was in a bad on again off again relationship when I realized that I needed to lose some weight to make myself and someone else happy. I started off just cutting my meals in half, and then it would get to the point where I would eat a small meal only one time a day, I would constantly be working out, and counting my calories. I have four sisters and I never thought they looked up to me. I was constantly talking about my weight, and how fat I was. It wasn't until my eight year old sister started talking about how fat she was getting when I realized I really needed to be careful about what I was saying. Even though my problem didn't get as bad as Lia's and I never had to go to treatment, I will always worry about my weight, and how I look. Like Lia said it has something to do with being able to have control over your life. There's so many things in life that happens and you don't have any control over it, but there's one thing you can control and that's what you put into your body.

Review of Wintergirls

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson is an awesome book for young teenage girls to read. It goes into depth about a teenage girl named Lia who struggles with an eating disorder that seperates Lia and her best friend. Her eating disorder also makes her relationship with her mother difficult. Her mother is a doctor, and so when dealing with her daughters eating disorder she acts more as her doctor than her mother. Young girls are constantly struggling with their weight and are obsessed with being skinny. They think that just not eating will make them "healthy", healthy is not just being stick skinny. Wintergirls takes young girls through the struggles and loses of having an eating disorder. It helps you understand that eating disorders are not healthy and in fact can kill you, seeing as how it took Lia's best friends life. In this book Lia also has a problem with cutting herself, now a days cutting is a serious problem. Many young girls cut for the same reason they develop eating disorders, they're depressed, their parents are divorced, they feel like they're not good enough, or there's a bigger problem that they don't want to talk about. Lia has been in and out of treatment facilities trying to conquer her eating disorder, and every time she fools her family, and the people at the treatment facility. She couldn't see how much the people around her cared about her. After her friend had died, and was haunting her she saw that she couldn't keep doing what she was doing.