Sarah's Library

10/2 - I don't know how I'm going to go with this one. The final sentence of the blurb on the back makes me think this is not for me -

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a deeply affecting coming-of-age story that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

Growing up wasn't wild, poignant, or roller-coaster for me. I had a very small group of friends who I ate lunch with. If one of them was away sick it was a really big deal because they were the only people I would sit with, or often talk to, in class. Towards the end of our time at school, as different classes kept us separate from each other I spent a lot of time sitting by myself, just doing the work and possibly asking the teacher a question. I became an expert at ignoring the idiotic boys who would spend the whole lesson trying to get my attention. I would just keep my head down and laugh to myself when they got in trouble for yelling out my name across the room (they'd sit behind me and start out with whispering, but when that didn't work they would eventually work themselves up to yelling). I only answered them once, I was sorry. One of them asked if I wanted to see their penis. I turned bright red, informed the teacher and ignored them for the next six years. I'd heard that they were likely to stop harassing me when they realised they weren't going to get a response out of me, I must have had some particularly stupid boys in my year level because they never seemed to get the message that I wasn't going to react.

I didn't go to any parties, I didn't sit at the back of the room and spend the whole class gossiping, I didn't turn up to school late, I did my homework, I did the work in class, I didn't run in the halls, I rarely got in trouble (two detentions in six years, one for going through the school to get to the library before school and one for forgetting a workbook for year 7 French). The wildest thing that happened to me during school was in year 8 when a boy managed to get a hold of my school diary and rang me at home wanting a friend of mine's phone number. He was one of the more idiotic idiots who spent most classes flicking/spitting paper at anyone within range, so I refused to give him her number. He 'changed schools' (probably a euphemism for 'was expelled') only a few months later.

Our ten year reunion was in 2012 and I remember this one guy, who I barely said two words to during school, telling me over and over that I was really different from what he remembered from school. I suggested that might be because I was actually talking to him.

So, as you can see there aren't a lot of memories that are going to resonate within me during the reading of this book. I watched the movie a couple of years ago and thought it was reasonable, but nothing to scream about. I think I'll have the same reaction over the book - above average, 3.5 stars, pretty good, worth reading once, not worth reading again - you know the feeling. To be continued...

While I still don't think I'm going to be 'affected' by this like people who had more a normal high school experiences, I do like Charlie (so far). I see a couple similarities between us - he enjoys reading and always reads the set book before the rest of the class does because he doesn't like reading only a chapter at a time (I did exactly that, read it through at my own speed and then read it a second time at the class's speed), and Charlie also says he 'writes the way he thinks' (which is exactly how I describe my own writing style, which explains the sometimes rambling nature of my reviews). To be continued...

11/2 - It's a good thing this is so short. The writing is so juvenile it reminds me of my own writing, from when I was 12. I looked back at my teenage journal and the language is exactly the same.

'Mary Elizabeth's favourite movie is Reds . Her favourite book is an autobiography of a woman who was a character in Reds . I can't remember her name. Mary Elizabeth's favourite colour is green. Her favourite season is spring. Her favourite ice cream flavour (she said she refuses to eat low-fat frozen yoghurt on principle alone) is Cherry Garcia. Her favourite food is pizza (half mushrooms, half green peppers). Mary is a vegetarian, and she hates her parents. She is also fluent in Spanish.'

I used to overuse the same words, write in short choppy sentences that started in the same way over and over again, just like that paragraph. And that's only a single paragraph, so far, the whole book is like this. The plot is okay, but it's not good enough to overcome the hurdle of the overly, needlessly immature language. Maybe if I was still that vocabularly-challenged 12-year-old I'd be charmed by the fact that the book reads like I could have written it, but as an adult I just find the language too simple and repetitive, even for a YA.  To be continued...

12/2 - I don't have much more to say about this book, I think I said it all yesterday. I can see why teenagers would find this so fantastic, but this is one of the few YA books I've read that I don't think translates well into adulthood.

PopSugar 2015 Reading Challenge: A Book Set in High School