Eleanor & Park

Book, 2012

Premise - When the new girl Eleanor steps onto the warzone that is a high school bus in 1980s Nebraska, she has nowhere to sit but next to Park. The two have an unspoken bond, first in disdain, then in curiosity, then in friendship and love, as they sit next to each other on the bus to and from school every single day.

Review - What a novel. This has been very passively on my to-read list for years, and I'm not exactly sure what prompted me to actually go ahead and read it. It wasn't very high up on my list. It was honestly just picked randomly and I wish that random impulse had come over me years ago.

I'm a sucker for most popular YA romance novels, and I think it's because so many of them are smart - smarter than their reputation would suggest. It's like novelists know the kind of audience who would sit in their bedroom reading are the kinds of teenagers and young adults who actually want to think about people in the world, go figure?

This is a very smart novel with two very smart, well thought-out characters. It's also got a smart format that bounces back and forth between Eleanor and Park's perspectives. It's edgy and cool and introduces a new generation to 80's music. But more saliently, this is a lustful novel. I can't think of any writing that can capture this level of slow-burn - the yearning, the anticipation, the longing, the agony, and the slowest of gratifications. There's not a single sex scene in this novel, yet I stand by the fact that I have not read anything that comes close to this level of lust.

The lust is all in text which makes it very easy to just fall into. But the characters themselves are not written to be "traditionally" good looking. Eleanor is overweight, curvy, with messy, wild red hair and pale skin. Worse still for her reputation, she's always in weird, manly clothes. Park is the only Asian kid in town, and Asian men have the worst reputation for sex appeal. And partway through the novel, he starts wearing eyeliner and probably would look like what we now would consider KPop.

To focus on Eleanor's undesirability for a bit, Park is attracted to all of the things that make her quirky - the weird clothes, the messy hair, all of it. But the novel makes it very, VERY clear that Eleanor does not present herself this way for anyone's pleasure, especially Park's. Park looks at this girl in wild clothing and thinks, "Wow, this is someone with a lot of confidence," but internally, Eleanor is filled with self-hatred. She's too poor to afford a laundry machine, her own bed, even a toothbrush. She wears old clothes because that's all she has. It is sort of an unraveling of this (and I hate this term) "manic pixie dream girl" where she's quirky all right, but it's a miserable kind of quirky not intended for anyone's gaze.

For all the reasons stated above, this book has powerful implications for social determinants of health and well-being, like socioeconomic class. The book also goes deep into the territories of abuse, misogyny, gender roles, racism, body issues, safety, and small-town mentalities. Each topic gives such important weight and three-dimensionality to the characters and the novel. It provides a full picture of their lives, both of them, as it surrounds the romance that sits in the center of the story.

I didn't want it to end. It was one of those novels where the second it was over, I hopped on Google to find out if a) they were making a movie, which they are, and b) if there will be a sequel, which there might. (96/100)

Quote -

“I don’t like you, Park. Sometimes I think I live for you”

"I don't like you" in this book is equivalent to "Okay" in The Fault in Our Stars, which I can see some parallels to!


What to read for - Maybe all of the recommendations to songs and comics, because that will definitely set you in the era.

If you liked this book, I'd recommend Call Me By Your Name!

Written by Rainbow Rowell
Published by Orion Books