Customer Comments

I must say that it is not my favorite book written by John Green it's still way better than most YA I've read. The characters are quirky yet believable and the plot is enticing, pulling you along with little whispers of Whitman's Song of Myself and Leaves of Grass and forcing you to think about how you see the people around you and how you connect with them. Quentin, and possibly John Green, ask you whether or not you can really know a person or if you will only ever know your own built up "idea" of them or some version of them that is just a projection of yourself.

This book will instantly make you remember what it was like to fall in love for the first time and how terrified and excited you were the first time you held someone's hand. Eleanor and Park are both well developed characters with great taste in books and music. That being said there were some times I definitely wanted to throw up from how sugary sweet their romance was and other times I wanted to throttle them both for being so bad at communicating with one another, but thus that is what being a teenager was all about and I probably would have been so over it if I didn't read it in two days. My only real criticism is that they don't really show how or why Eleanor's mother would continue to stay with her abusive stepfather, it would be more realistic and have a bigger impact if they explained more about how impossible it is to get out of those situations.

Meg Wolitzer is a true story teller, at no point did this feel to me like a novel with a focus and a story arc, it felt like living a life. In finishing this novel I felt like I lived a lifetime, I had unrequited dreams, great friends, and a constant quest for what it all meant and who I was supposed to become. As a writer, the scope of this novel is mind blowing, and it also challenged me to think about my creativity and "talent" and how it may or may not follow me through life.