By Shireen Korkzan
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Do you remember the time when you felt advanced reading Cut or Stop Pretending, only to realize a few years later that it was garbage? The one exception was Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. That novel is a work of art that can truly be called a “good young adult novel,” or perhaps the hay in the needlestack.

So when Anderson came out with Twisted in 2007 and it was constantly being raved as a novel with the same quality and vibe as Speak, my expectation was high. I was expecting a well-written, mature piece of young adult literature. What I got instead was a mainstream teenage book about some illiterate loser who constantly threated to kill himself or someone else every single page and used the words “dweeb,” “freak” and “butt” every other paragraph. Nineties vocabulary, anyone?

So as not to make the readers’ eyes bleed, basically Twisted is a story of how one high school boy survives being bullied in school due to being a nerd and having a reputation for being a cold-blooded killer. Tyler Miller has suffered all throughout middle and the first half of high school by being mistreated, made fun of or completely ignored altogether.

This all changes until the end of his junior year when he decides to establish a solid reputation by conducting the Foul Deed, which is to spray paint the walls of the high school (and misspelling “phenomenal” and “testicle” along the way), only to be caught by the police after leaving his wallet at the scene of the crime. But while the whole school hates him for existing, the most popular girl in schools shows interest in him, despite her jock brother’s disapproval. The rest of the novel is spent with Tyler dealing with every worst-case scenario that could happen to a boy during the course of his senior year (and vividly and artistically describing his erections every ten chapters), like getting accused of submitting pornographic pictures of his love interest on the Internet.

It’s not that everything about Twisted is horrid. It just doesn’t glorify what makes Speak so appealing to young adult (it was a dud in comparison, if anything). It’s like every other young adult novel, a story that blandly portrays the suffering of the high school outcast. Readers won’t tell that Speak and Twisted are both written by the same author. Speak has flavor, Twisted has unnecessary humor over the most serious parts.

What especially makes Anderson’s newest book unappealing is the lack of depth to the story. This book had every potential to be a great work of writing, but Anderstand didn’t quite take the chance this time. But sometimes it’s better to take that risk and not tinny the writing to the point of having to weaken the power of quality literature. Twisted does not reach out to a specific audience, which is what strong writing should do. The best part of this novel is that the chapters are short and the pain can easily be endured for no longer than a day.

Alright, so no author is perfect. One disaster can strike at some point in their career. For Anderson, Twisted is her disaster. If the title Twisted matched anything with the book, it epitomizes the “twistedness” of the author’s lack of Speak-like quality writing in 250 pages of disappointment.

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TWISTED
Pages: 250
Plot: C
Quality of Writing: D
Re-readability: C-
Overall: D+