Words

Author's Note: This piece is written as an analysis of a book titled Speak that is a fictitious story about a girl who is in trouble with a guy.

Why me? why me? It’s just not fair. No, I know, this isn’t happening. Yes that’s it, it’s just not happening. These are some of the questions victims ask themselves while they are being attacked. According to the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 2004 Victims of Violent Juvenile Crime. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, victims of sexual assault committed by juveniles are younger than 18 years of age approximately 96 percent of the time. If you are in trouble you need to talk to someone because no one wants to be assaulted, and they may be able to help you. I learned that you should never let anyone that you don’t know get your personal information because of this book. It helped to make the lesson clearer to me. In Speak Laurie Halse Anderson teaches us that our actions will always speak louder than our words.

When you are in your teen years, you can be succumbed to sexual violence. It is usually never fair. You can’t always help it if you are in trouble, but you can help yourself by always being careful in what you say and do. The main character, Melinda, is greeting her freshman year of high school with no friends because of THE event that happened during her summer vacation: she was sexually assaulted by a boy that she hardly knew. She feels like an outcast, but on the first day is greeted by a new girl named Heather. Melinda doesn’t really have anything in common with Heather except that she is an outcast because she is new. Melinda quickly figures out that her old friends want nothing to do with her. She wants so badly to tell them the truth but cannot because they wouldn’t believe her. She tries to write her old best friend, Rachel, a note to be careful, because Rachel has gotten involved with the boy who assaulted her. Her ex-best friend chooses not to believe her because she thinks that she is just jealous that Melinda is not going to the prom and she is. Rachel ends up almost getting hurt because she thinks that the boy she is with is perfectly harmless.

Actions are taken louder than your words because body language gives away the tone in your voice. Laurie Halse Anderson teaches us this important lesson in the book Speak. Why do people do these awful things? No one ever knows.

The Girl on Fire

Author's Note: Catching Fire, is the sequel to the Hunger Games. If you want to know which book is better you will have to find out for yourself.

 Why would she do that? What was she thinking? These questions kept bouncing around in my head while I was reading Suzanne Collins’, Catching Fire. Why would Katniss, a girl from District 12, the poorest district, who has always been short on money, clothes, food, water, and had very few nice things, want to sacrifice her life for someone; give up her life for this boy who had been nice to her one time? She was crazy. If I were offered a lifetime of luxuries for free, just for surviving a few days at the most, a week, in a place called an arena, I would for sure take that opportunity, as long as I didn’t have to kill anybody; I would just sit on the side and watch it all and do my best to survive because that is the point of the Games: to kill people. Collins teaches us that we need to be grateful for the things that we have, and that we can’t all have anything and everything at the drop of a hat.

When we were younger our parents, sometimes our mothers, and sometime our fathers, taught us that we need to be polite, have manners, and be grateful. These are some of the few main things that we are taught and are not only encouraged, but it is expected that we do these things with the utmost respect. In this book: it’s obvious that President Snow was never taught these things. He has zero percent respects for all of the people he ‘rules’ over. While manners play a big part in our world, but sometimes power plays a bigger role.

Even though the Hunger Games, takes place in the distant future, these issues are still present in today’s world. In our time, according to the website Africanpress.me, Sudan’s leader, Omar al-Bashir is the worst dictator in our entire world out of the 70 countries that are ruled by dictators. We are very lucky to be able to live in a country where we are maybe not allowed to act upon our opinions necessarily, but we are at least allowed to have opinions.

Being grateful is important, although we can’t always have everything that we want, and Suzanne Collins does a spectacular job teaching this in Catching Fire. Now you need to remember and realize that it is not all about us and our needs, but about helping others and being thankful for what we are privileged enough to have.