Book Review: Eleanor & Park

Title: Eleanor & Park

Author: Rainbow Rowell

Page Length: 328

Summary from Goodreads:

Two misfits.
One extraordinary love.

Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.

Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.

Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

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Holy heart strings. All the feels inside me right now. I'm almost not sure I can even wrap up my thoughts on this book. The book is told in alternating points of view. I liked this because you get to see how Eleanor & Park’s story unfolds for both of them. They always say there's more than one side to every story and I really enjoyed getting to see it. The story itself was so sweet. I know. How cliché. But seriously. The characters are 16. That's 8 years younger than me. Not to mention I did not have boyfriends in high school. Hell I barely had boyfriends in college. So how could I possibly relate to this young love story? Excellent writing of course. This author gets it. I love when books make me talk out loud to myself. Does it make me look batty? Well yeah, but I'm okay with that. Again, nothing that happened in either character’s lives in the book has ever happened to me & I was still so emotionally invested in their lives. The first time they held hands I literally said yay out loud.

So yay for happiness. However. & I know, how sad. Why must there always be a however? However, like most young love it had to end. Granted in this story the ending was one that was appropriate and necessary even if does still make you want to curl up in a ball and pretend like it didn't happen.

Some of Park’s last entries were hard for me. It just made me so sad. I think this was another good life lesson. It’s good to do the right thing, but even the right thing can still suck majorly.

As for the very end, I thought it was great. To end on such a way to let each reader interpret their own ending was very unique to me. I know what three words I chose. But someone else could choose three other words and that's okay. I appreciate the author letting me have the ability to imagine their future how I wanted to instead of forcing an ending I might not like on me.