I had not heard of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl until I saw the previews for the movie that was recently released. I probably won’t see this one until it hits Netflix or HBO; but that is more my husband’s aversion to indie films and less a testament to the novel.
Greg Gaines is a high school senior who has tried his whole academic career to fly under the radar of his school’s social hierarchy. Everyone “kind of” likes him and “sort of” knows who he is, but the closest thing he has to a friend is Earl who he make parody or homage films with. There is another review on CBR that suggests the movie will be better than the book because you could see the films and I agree I’d like to see the silly films but I also worry when a book is heavily narrated the film adaptation suffers. However, I wasn’t a big fan of the “sorry this book is terrible”, “why are you reading this”, “sorry sorry” interludes Andrews uses throughout the novel.
Greg’s life is turned upside down when his meddling mother insists he spends time with Rachel; they were somewhat friendly back in Hebrew school and now she has leukemia. Rachel is apprehensive to Greg’s new-found sense of friendly duty, however Earl mentions their films and the three of them move forward with a shoestring sense of friendship. As Rachel gets worse Earl and Greg decide to make a film about her life and discover how hard it is to document the life of someone who you don’t know that well and who hasn’t lived much of a life.
Unlike Fault in our Stars, which this book inevitably draws comparisons to, there is little focus on “the Cancer” and Rachel’s death gets only a sentence. I felt considerably less involved in the lives of Greg and Rachel, however I did feel some sympathy to Greg’s crappy homelife, than Hazel and Gus.
