The Perks of Being a Wallflower
1999
- young adult fiction
- bildungsroman
- epistolary fiction
- bildungsromans
- diary novels
- fiction
- juvenile works
- young adult works
- juvenile fiction
- high school students
The story
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult coming-of-age epistolary novel by American writer Stephen Chbosky, which was first published on February 1, 1999, by Pocket Books. Set in the early 1990s, the novel follows Charlie, an introverted observing teenager, through his freshman year of high school in a Pittsburgh suburb. The novel details Charlie's unconventional style of thinking as he navigates between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood, and attempts to deal with poignant questions spurred by his interactions with both his friends and family.
What it’s like
Told entirely in earnest letters to an unnamed friend, the prose has the soft, run-on candor of a diary kept in a bedroom at night: short dated confessions, sudden lists, quotations from favourite songs and books, and the faint hush of early-nineties suburbia, with mixtapes, basement parties, and car rides through tunnels lit by passing streetlamps. The voice is tender and observant, a little naive and very sincere, and the book moves in brisk, uneven bursts that linger on small moments of belonging before turning quiet again. Its emotional register is bittersweet and warm, a slow ache of wanting to be seen, and its people's arcs trace a shy, bruised boy slowly opening up to friendship and his own feelings. Intensity is moderate: there is sexual content, drinking and drug use, a few scenes of abuse and self-harm described with restraint, and occasional sharp emotional cruelty. It is not gory, but its darker passages land hard. Good for a quiet rainy weekend, a reflective late-night read, or readers who want a bittersweet, confessional coming-of-age story that takes adolescent feeling seriously.
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