Out of My Heart

When Melody is uncertain how much to share with Noah and not wanting to sound “nutso” (216), she decides to share with Noah how, when she hears music, she sees colors. As she taps out her explanation about how Beethoven sounds blue and Herbie Hancock sounds tan, Noah stops her and assures her enthusiastically that he also sees colors when he listens to music. Melody and Noah’s experience is similar to a neurological condition called synesthesia, wherein a person experiences sensations using a different sense than usual; for example, they might experience audio visually, visual elements by taste, taste elements as touch, etc. Melody frequently emphasizes the colors she sees when experiencing the world around her.

Throughout her week at camp, Melody is alert to the camp’s vibrant colors. When the campers take their ride on the pontoon, Melody gets lost in all the shades of blue and green in the lake and along the shore. In her first art class, when she understands that she is expected to get messy with the paint, she admits as she thrusts her hands into the paint cans the “globs of color felt good” (106) as she dips into the purple and the red, then the blue and the green to create her art project. Later, when Melody is being reprimanded for stealing out of camp with her cabinmates, she marvels that how her counselors’ voices seem like colors to her.

Colors symbolize Melody’s love of life as well as her untapped creativity and her sensitivity to the world around her. Whether she is rocketing skyward in the playground swing or speeding down the zipline overlooking treetops, the world delights her with its colors. Melody notes the colors for the camp T-shirts, the balloons for the game, the campfire, the friendship bracelets, and the camp food.

The night when she and her three new friends share their experiences with other kids back home, that sense of friendship and trust registers with Melody as a color, as she thinks, “Our cozy room was filled with deep blue” (294). Her vivid sense of colors reveals not just an eye for beauty but also an open and animated conversation Melody has with the world. That love of the world confirms that Melody refuses to give in to what she terms a “pity party” (33). The world is bright and alive and stuns Melody every moment she takes it in.

Melody Brooks comes to the reader entirely as her voice. The reader is given insight into what those around her do not always get: her voice, distinctive, articulate, funny, clear, and immediate.

Out of My Heart is narrated by a character who cannot speak. Because of her cerebral palsy, Melody has never spoken a word. She can make sounds and she can hum. Through the Medi-Talker she carries with her, she is able to type what she wants to say, and then the machine repeats her typed messages in a girl’s speaking voice. But even Elvira, her name for the Medi-Talker, cannot keep up with the thoughts that pass through her head; thoughts she would love to share. When she and Noah have their first conversation, Melody is frustrated by what she wants to say, and cannot type fast enough, and she reflects, “I’m unable to say actual words like everybody else, and that drives me bananas. I’ve got like a thousand thoughts and questions zooming around in my head. Like. All. The Time” (10).

Melody as a narrator symbolizes the gift of Melody finding a way to express herself. The book gives Melody the chance to share her innermost thoughts, her fears, her anxieties, her frustrations, and as the week at camp passes, her joy over making friends and that funny feeling in her stomach whenever she catches Noah’s eye. The reader hears Melody, not Elvira. Melody’s voice as narrator reveals her sharp intellect, her no-nonsense approach to people, her savvy assessment of her own physical condition, and her determination not to be defined by cerebral palsy. Melody’s voice expresses who she is without apology. 

Melody’s commitment to defining herself independent from her disability is represented in the voice that tells the story. Unlike her cruel friends, who see her wheelchair only and seldom bother to see her as a person, the reader never sees the wheelchair. Rather, the reader engages the voice first, upbeat and brimming with energy and tinged with a little sarcasm.