Okay, I have to admit that I posted the last review to get it out of the way so that I could write this one... *g*
This is an excellent book - I bought it yesterday, sat down with it this morning, and didn't put it down or move until I'd finished. And wah - I finished!
Eleanor is the new girl in town, and with her chaotic family life, her mismatched clothes and unruly red hair, she couldn't stick out more if she tried. Park is the boy at the back of the bus. Black t-shirts, headphones, head in a book - he thinks he's made himself invisible. But not to Eleanor... never to Eleanor. Slowly, steadily, through late-night conversations and an ever-growing stack of mix tapes, Eleanor and Park fall for each other. The fall in love the way you do for the first time, when you're young, and you feel as if you have nothing and everything to lose.
The blurb almost makes it seem as if the book is a straightforward teen romance,
but that is so far from truth - there's so much more to this story. Not only is there a world beyond the simple boy-girl love-story, and beyond the whole kids-at-school story, but it's a world that is real and matters. It matters whether people know that world exists, and it matters what they think of doing about it. Not that there are any heroes in this story - at least not the big macho kind, just the ordinary kind, that we could all be if we were sometimes just a little bit braver. When we're sometimes a little bit braver. And like us, they're not black-and-white heroes.
Eleanor and Park are both drawn as such real people too, just like the rest of the characters in the story, down to the least important, that you feel like you're friends with them - or at least that you want to be - almost straight away. I read Fangirl by Rowell on my Kobo last year, and loved it, so much that when I saw the paperback version in the bookshop the other day I knew I had to have it - and then I found Eleanor and Park on the shelf too, which I'd wanted to read since I read Fangirl - actually when I
check her blog I see that she's touring the UK soon, which probably explains why everyone suddenly seems to have heard of her - even the Guardian
just posted a review of Fangirl. It was a good choice, it's one of those books that you don't just read, you feel.
Anyway, basically - this is a brilliant book, with real live characters, and I'm going to be re-reading Fangirl shortly and asking my bookshop to order her other two books... *g*