“And you look like a protagonist…You look like the person who wins in the end”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park“What if Park realized that all the things he thought were so mysterious and intriguing about her were actually just … bleak?”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
I picked up this book as I read somewhere that it parallels some plot points with Normal People. I personally did not find many parallels but the number of mentions of this book on this site prompted me to check it out.
Going to a new school is never easy, but joining in the middle of the year when you are too tall, and too big, too red-headed, and too different from the other kids (both in dress and in home life), is especially rough for Eleanor. She is barely managing to scrape along from one harrowing encounter to the next. After getting kicked out of her home by her stepfather and living with “foster parents” for a year, Eleanor is finally retrieved by her mother and brought home to live with her three younger siblings in a tiny house ruled by the volatile dictator that is her stepfather.
Through a series of swapped mixtapes, a borrowed cassette player, and X-men comics, Eleanor befriends Park, the emo-ish kid who deigns to let her sit next to him on the school bus. He endures her presence and then, over time, their friendship develops into something more than just fondness.
This story ticked all of the right boxes for me: a 1980’s middle-America setting with the relevant pop-culture and musical touchstones, forbidden love, opposites attract, and tear-stained self-sacrifice. However, something was missing. I tore through this book hoping to get to the point where these silly teens tore my heart out with their tenderness and longing. But the characters never hooked me in the way other favorite YA romances have.
This is my first Rainbow Rowell book. I wanted to give it 2.5 stars but I am rounding it up to 3 because it is such a page-turner. But it wasn’t anything special. The characters weren’t that memorable, at least not to me. I ached for them and rooted for them. But the villains were straight out of the 1980’s and 1990’s teen shows I watched as reruns in front of my own TV after school. They were fine, at the time. And I have considered that maybe I didn’t enjoy this book because it wasn’t written for me, a middle-aged woman raised in the latter half of the 20th century. But that’s not true because there are so many truly excellent books about first love and unfortunately this is not one of them.
Marking this as CBR15 under recommended by a friend.