Sarah's Library

20/7 - Bloody double CRAP!!!! Why is it so easy to close an IE window? There should be a warning that you have to click yes to confirm that you really do want to close the window/delete your whole review without saving it. I will try to recreate the most interesting parts.

This just did not resonate with me the way it did with EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. MY. FRIENDS., even the most cynical and jaded towards YA. Eleanor and Park's high school experience was not my high school experience. Yes, I was teased, but mostly it was just ostracisation. I was even shoved a couple of times (I kind of 'let' the second occurrence happen to make sure that I hadn't imagined the first) by a large girl from the school basketball team. But as soon as she shoved/bumped/barged into me the second time I went straight to a teacher and we sat down together with a year book until I pointed out the girl and her offsider. I was a little disturbed by the experience of this tall and muscular girl purposefully knocking into me, but I wasn't truly scared because I had complete faith in the teacher's ability to fix it, and fix it she did. After that second bump I never had another run in with either girl again, and had no further experiences like it. I still don't know why the girl targeted me.

I was hardly what you would call popular - I have type 1 diabetes, have had three major heart surgeries that left large distinct scars, and was always really standoffish with kids my age - but I was lucky, I had a core group of five friends and I tenaciously stuck with them throughout high school (possibly to the point of annoyance, but it can't have been that bad 13 years later we're still together). When my friends couldn't join me for lunch (for whatever reason) I would take a book and read it while I ate lunch, then sit in the school library once I'd eaten. If none of my friends were in my next class (which happened more and more frequently as we entered VCE and began branching off to study different subjects) I would simply concentrate on what the teacher was saying or writing and ignore the paper balls being shot at my head or the idiots from the back row stage-whispering my name in an attempt to get me to turn around. It wasn't like they had anything earth-shattering to say to me, the one time I did turn around (this was in year 7, so I was young and naïve) I got an eyeful of a lurid illustration they'd done of their own penises. I learnt my lesson that day, and they never managed to get my attention again, they did however get a ton of attention from numerous teachers who wanted to know what was so damn important that they had to shout my name across the room, of course they couldn't tell the teacher the truth and tended to be too slow-witted to come up with a good lie, so ended up saying "Uhh, nothing Miss.". That always made me laugh.

I also didn't have the connection with music that Eleanor and Park did. Cassettes were done, CDs were in but the recordable ones were hard to come by. My friends and I never sat around listening to music (literally, it actually never happened). We rarely went to each other's houses after school because despite going to the same school we didn't live all that close to each other. It was too far to walk, too complicated to take public transport and of course our parents were still at work at 3:30, plus the biggest reason - we had homework and we were all good students, so we did our homework. 95% of the time we spent together was time spent at school. We went to the movies a few times, but that was about it. We didn't (don't) dress alike, we didn't like much of the same things at all, we didn't go clothes shopping together, we didn't shop for our formal dresses together. We're actually probably closer now, after school, than we were during school.

If I was to recommend this book it would be to readers who have something in common with Eleanor or Park, some experience that they can connect with and say "Okay, I know how she/he feels there, that's just like what happened to me." I didn't get that once and that's why I just 'liked' it. The writing was good, the characters were good, but I had none of these 'feels' that everyone's talking about and I think you need to have those 'feels' in order to find this a fantastic book.