Eleanor & Park
2012
- love & romance
- love
- juvenile fiction
- teenagers
- fiction
- bullying
- first loves
- dating (social customs)
- high schools
- schools
The story
## 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.
What it’s like
Warm, close and bittersweet, with the texture of 1980s Omaha suburbia rendered in cassette tapes, comic books and shared headphones on a rattling school bus. Rowell's prose is conversational and funny in a sideways way, full of quick interior asides, lists and overheard banter, so the reading feels like being let into a teenager's notebook with the margins full of doodles and song lyrics. Sensory details keep returning to the everyday: stale cafeteria air, a stepfather's heavy footsteps, the clatter of a cold kitchen, the slow dry-mouthed anxiety of a bus ride past bullies. The vibe is tender and wistful, a slow-burn romance with an undercurrent of unease at home. Violence is present but not graphic: there is abuse and bullying, and a few scenes of threatened or shown physical cruelty land hard, though nothing is described in gore. Sexual content is limited to kissing and emotionally charged hand-holding, with some frank teenage talk. Best for readers who want a melancholic, funny, heartfelt love story over a school year, a cozy-but-aching rainy-afternoon read, and for those who enjoy young-adult romance that doesn't look away from domestic hardship.
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