Eleanor & Park

Eleanor & Park

  - Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This gets added into the long list of books that I bought with high expectations (after hearing everyone sing praises about it), but which fell flat for me. The whole world seemed to be raving about this book, and so I had bought it as a gift for my then 11-year old niece. I am thankful for the timely advice of fellow members of my reading group that I didn't give it to her. I then meant to read it myself, but kept putting it off as it seemed that it was a heart breaking novel and in the current situation, I was in no mood for it. In the end, the only thing about it that broke my heart was the money and time I spent on this.

I am not fond of romance as a genre, and this YA romance turned out to be something I should have stayed away from. It didn't give me a sense of the freshness of young love; actually, the romance angle was altogether unrealistic and sprung out of the blue - for the interaction between the lead pair till that point, a close friendship would have been more natural progression in their relationship. I also found the "he is so cute I want to eat his face" kind of statements icky.

It's also not the story it was supposed to be - the journey of two misfits supporting each other, to navigate the craziness that is high school. Park doesn't really have any challenges except his own inferiority complex; for all his purported disappointment with Park, his father is very supportive of him. Eleanor's family situation is definitely something that makes one sympathize with her and her siblings. The ending didn't move me particularly, though I am the type who cry easily through books and movies, because I didn't really connect with the characters. I was more interested to find how will things turn out for eleanor's mother and siblings.

I usually like two person narrative, but here the switching voices mostly annoyed me, as in many places the change kept happening after a paragraph or even a sentence.

I initially rated it 2.5, but as I wrote this review, I realized that neither the story, nor the presentation, and not even the writing style worked for me, so I change my rating to 2.