Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
My rating: 3/5 cats
oh god, somebody buy this girl some perspective! oh wait, you can’t because she’s dead. and i, for one, am glad of it because this character would have grown up to be a rotten judgmental schoolmarmy horrorshow of an adult. just horrible.
and people love this book like cookies!
backtrack. plot: a girl kills herself. but before she goes, she makes a series of audio cassettes and mails them to an individual, with instructions to pass them along to the next person mentioned on the tapes, which are a chronicle of all the things that were done to her that made her kill herself. it was because of you. and you. and you. the blame game, afterlife edition. what a dick, right?
and i understand the idea of cause and effect, and that teenagers of all people, need to be more conscious of the effects their actions have on the feeeeelings of others, and this book is meant to highlight that even the smallest things can have a profound effect on a person’s life, but ugh – this character is appalling. and does she not realize the effect her accusations are going to have on the recipients of the tapes?? because it is a shitty thing to do when people can’t defend themselves, particularly since the awful tragic things that happened to her are pretty standard stuff we have all been through. mostly. nothing suicide-worthy, frankly. and nothing to make other people feel shitty about for the rest of their lives.
when you are sitting on the same side of a booth at a diner with a boy on valentines day and you are laughing and you put your head on his shoulder and he puts his hand on your leg, that is not a problem, it is called flirtation. and if you don’t like it, use your words, and if that doesn’t work, get physical. which she does. and succeeds. so what’s with all the boo-hoos?? that no one came to your rescue?? princess, no one is ever going to come to your rescue. you did what you were supposed to do – feel proud and call it a day. a somewhat shitty day, but no reason to kill yourself.
she basically uses her suicide to scold boys who have flirted with her or tried to hook up with her. or said she had a nice ass. these are teenagers! they are going to try to hook up with anything that is still breathing! i have dodged many an unwanted advance in my early years, and i have exhaustedly given in to others as the path of least resistance, but that’s youth, right? chalk everything up to a learning experience and laugh about it in your adulthood.
are we supposed to feel that she is empowered for taking her life? because i don’t. i feel like she had a normal sized problem that she willingly made a little bigger in a hot tub, but honestly, suburban new hampshire white girl, here is a book called push. go read that and tell me you have problems.
i know i gave this three stars cats, and it is because i did like the way the story was told, as a split-narrative between the transcripts of the tapes, and the voice of a boy who is one of the accused, as we wait for his part in it to unfold, as he wonders what she thinks he did to her (anticlimax, btw). but so as a plot-driven quasi-mystery book, it definitely held my interest, but the whole time, i couldn’t help thinking what a brat she was and how unfair some of her accusations were, particularly to the narrator and the last recipient of the tapes. sheesh. brat.
(if she heard me say that, she would try really hard to come back to life so she could make me a tape telling me how i wounded her soul and then she would kill herself again to make me feel guilty. but i would not.)
