Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language:  A few common swear words.

Violence:  The main character suffered a rape, which was not graphically described.  The boy attacks the girl again later, and they physically fight.

Sexual content:  The cheerleaders are described as scoring more than the football players and having “group rate” abortions.  I rated it a 3 because of the topic.

Adult Themes:   This story is about the emotional suffering of a teen rape victim.  There is also trouble at home because her parents don’t get along.  There is a hint her parents are having affairs.  Teens drink at a party.

Synopsis

Melinda is an outcast.  She starts high school shunned, because everyone seems to know that she called the cops at the wild teen party in August.  She does not Speak.  She does not Tell.  No one knows what really happened.  She makes one friend, Heather, so she has someone to eat lunch with.  Even though they are very different from each other, they cling to each other the first part of the year.  Melinda shows she does not care about school.  Formerly a solid B student, she is failing most of her classes, and spends much of her time hiding, hiding physically in a broom closet, or hiding emotionally by sleeping through class or just shutting people out.  The reader now knows she was raped at the party, and Melinda cannot confide in anyone.  Not only can she not talk of what happened, but she can hardly talk at all.  Most of the time she is silent.  Eventually the boy who committed the crime starts dating Melinda’s former friend, and Melinda wants to warn her.  She starts getting stronger through her art and her gardening.  She reaches out to keep the same thing from happening to someone else, and once she Speaks, she starts to fight back, people stick up for her, and she starts to heal.

This is a powerful book about the suffering of the rape victim, and about the suffering of being silent about it.  As her months dragged on, I felt her pain, I was sinking with her, I was screaming inside, “why doesn’t someone find a way to get through to her!”  Yet in the end, there is a positive direction for Melinda.  When she finally tells someone, healing begins.  I have to say the author is brutal in her stereotyping of high school kids as cliquish. I appreciated the topic without any graphic descriptions of the crime.  This book might be too much for some 14- or 15- year- olds, but I would recommend it as an important book for older teens and college age.