Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, artwork by Emily Carroll

Speak: The Graphic Novel by Laurie Halse Anderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this remarkable and have been taking some time to quite figure out how to review it and what to say about it. I am unfamiliar with Laurie Halse Anderson’s original text so was coming to this fresh. I had some idea of what it was about due to my research work and I knew that it was iconic but I did not wholly know what it was. And then, all of a sudden, I did. I knew everything about this brutally honest, deeply affecting, breathtakingly emotional, fiercely raw piece of storytelling and I knew that I loved it and admired it and respected it immensely.

I also wondered if I would be able to write about it because I knew that sometimes the experience of reading something like this does not quite translate into words. They feel too simple, somehow, to brief, to unable to encapsulate those moments when you know that you should go to bed or that you have other things to do but you cannot stop reading and yet every page makes you want to hug the protagonist so very hard and never let her go and yet, you can never get away from the fact that you are just this person, this distanced onlooker, who must witness and pay testament to this devastating documentation of the impact of trauma upon a young girl.

So this, so that, so here we are. I feel the back of my neck tingle again with the memory of it, my fingers remember the way I turned the page and how I desperately willed for certain things to happen in this story and then I willed for others to stop, to end. It is graphic and it is brutal and it is hard but it is also one of the most visceral and fearless pieces of storytelling that I have come across for a long time. I can’t comment on how well it’s adapted because of my unfamiliarity with the source but I can tell you this: what Emily Carroll does is bloody and raw and brilliant. She embraces wildness on the page in a discomforting familiar manner. You think you know where the page is going but then, all of a sudden, you’ll be somewhere else. Somewhere darker. Somewhere full of rough and uknowable edges. Somewhere fiercely, utterly true.

There are content warnings here of course, and they involve sexual assault, physical assault, emotional abuse, physical abuse, self-harm, and dealing with the after effects of trauma. It’s not an easy read and the ending is some of the most difficult stuff I have ever read. And yet also with that, it is also some of the most empowering and powerful stuff I have ever read. It’s an amazing, essential, horrific, awe-making read. Every inch of it is perfection.

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