'The first time I taught Speak, someone disclosed they had been raped to me,' he remembers. Victor Malo-Juvera, an English professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, taught Speak for years in a Florida public high school. Published in 1999, Speak isn't the first young adult novel about sexual assault, but it stands out because it won major awards, became a best-seller and is still regularly taught in high schools and middle schools across the country. It took almost 25 years for a book about nonconsensual sex to have a similar impact, and that book came in the form of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, about a high school freshman who's raped at a party by a popular senior. The 1975 novel was nonjudgmental and centered on a girl's positive decision, making it unprecedented in mainstream young adult fiction. One of the first mainstream books to straightforwardly depict positive, consensual sex was Judy Blume's Forever. where she's kind of thinking through all these issues,' Hartzler explains, 'and she says, you know, 'We've been so wrapped up in our town about what it means to say 'no' that I haven't really given any consideration to what it means to say 'yes.' ' 'Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Speak Author Laurie Halse Anderson Kate and her boyfriend, Ben, are themselves teenagers trying to decide whether to have sex. 'And it's sort of up to Kate to figure out what happened, and then if she'll speak up about it or not.'

'There are all of these voices telling her what she should do, what she should think to lay low the town circles the wagons around these star athletes,' Hartzler says. Its narrator, Kate, used to be one of the victim's best friends. His 2015 book What We Saw was directly inspired by the Steubenville case. Hartzler is one of many young adult novelists responding to that national conversation. They also raised a question for author Aaron Hartzler, who writes novels for young adults: 'What must it be like to be coming of age sexually in the midst of a national conversation about rape culture and consent?' How?Īll those stories have helped intensify the conversation about sexual assault at colleges and in high schools. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title What We Saw Author Aaron Hartzler

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