Category: Young Adult
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13: 9780374371524
Pub. Date: October 1999
Date Read: July 2009
"It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache."
Melinda Sordino has just started ninth grade and in the first few pages of her story we see how the kids are divided at school. They become part of clans; the Jocks, the Goths, the Suffering Artists, the Marthas, and so on, but Melinda doesn't belong to any of these. She's an Outcast.
She didn't used to be an outcast. She had friends but now those friends talk about her, ignore her and they hate her. At a summer party Melinda called the cops and thus earned the scorn of her friends but no one bothered to find out why she would call the cops.
Melinda only hopes to get through the year and it seems the best way to do that is to speak as little as possible. She manages to have one friend, Heather who is a new student, but she doesn't really share much with Heather either.
Perhaps the only sanctuary Melinda has is her art class. With the help of her art teacher who encourages the students to free their imagination and their thoughts, she thinks that maybe that which she's kept hidden may find a voice.
The writer captures the tumultuous feelings of a young girl growing up with secrets. We share her pain as she feels she can't even speak to her parents about what has happened to her and we understand how she falls into a deep depression.
Despite the sadness that is present in Melinda's life, there is definitely a lot of hope at the end of the story and my only criticism of the book is that I wish I knew what happened next. A wonderful and powerful story.