Synopsis :

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won’t talk to her, and people she doesn’t even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that’s not safe. Because there’s something she’s trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth. This extraordinary first novel has captured the imaginations of teenagers and adults across the country.

The story :

This is the story of a young girl who after an aggression is ignored by all her friends and has to face the terrible adolescent world.

The characters :

Melinda is the principal character and the only narrator. She don’t speak often, she is depressed, sad, angry and lonely. All her friends dumped her after she calls the cops at a party at the end of summer.

Heather is the new girl in school and she eventually will be a sort of friend for Melinda.

The art professor is a great person and he will help Melinda to express his feelings in the art. It will help her to speak finally about what happens.

My review :

I think that it is great that some authors have the courage to write on these subjects. What we live to the college or to the high school can be sometimes traumatizing and the other people’s opinion often prevent us from saying what we feel or even what happened.

There are a few dialogues and what bothered me is rather the writing style. I don’t know how explained but I found that everything was a little written as if Laurie Halse Anderson wrote these thoughts as they arrived in her mind.

But this is a book which must be read and I regret moreover that it is not translated into French.

My review is short because I still quite returned by this book and the feelings that I was able to felt by reading it.