Easy Conversation

Friday I wrote about what I perceived as a lack of "round" female characters in young adult fiction, with the assumption that I'd counter that post with examples from my recent reading of female-oriented novels, including Speak and The Lovely Bones. But having completed Bones over the weekend, and with its poetic language still echoing around in my head, it looks like Speak will take a back seat in a follow-up entry.

But first I should acknowledge the rather obvious common thread in both Anderson's and Sebold's novels (and this isn't, I think, a spoiler for anyone who has heard anything about either book): they both are told from the point of view of a protagonist who has been raped. Sebold, in a 2002 interview with powells.com stated that one of her goals in writing both The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a memoir of her own experience with rape, was for the word rape "to be used easily in conversation." Often the issue seems to be swept under the rug, or not deemed appropriate for polite conversation. But for the two young women who give their voices to these novels, it is both a defining moment in their lives and their initiation into sexuality. Themes in both Speak and The Lovely Bones address the issues of how to acknowledge what happened and how to "pick up the pieces," particularly when it comes to sexuality and trusting the men that surround them. When Susie, the murdered narrator of The Lovely Bones, looks down on her sister's first sexual experience, she says, "In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows" (125).

Susie and Melinda (the narrator of Speak), it should be said, have vastly different stories- surely no two stories of sexual violence are identical. They're also written for slightly different audiences: Speak is specifically written for young adults (though not only for young women!), and The Lovely Bones, though told by a fourteen-year-old narrator, is decidedly not a young adult novel; if any of you are put off by graphic imagery, you may want to stick to something a little lighter. But read together, they begin to form a picture of not only the experience of sexual violation, but of its lasting effects.