Counting My Blessings and Book Four

Still don't know what to say about book two so on to book four! Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. I loved the vast majority of this book and I fully recommend it...

In the middle of their sophomore year, Eleanor is the new girl at school and her introduction to her classmates is less than ideal. She is thrown to the wolves on a public school bus. Park wants nothing to do with her, she is too bright, too obvious, and too big. Some small part of him takes pity though and he shares his seat with her.

From this point on they develop an unlikely friendship that becomes an even more unlikely romance.

So after my last post, I was especially determined to back away from the teen books for a bit and bury the post. If it sounded insecure and whiny, well, that's because it was. Anyway, I intended to finish a couple of the books I started before I read another teen book. Then we got this in as an advanced reader. Advanced readers are one of my favorite parts of working in a bookstore. Publishers want us to read their books so they send us copies for free, usually a few months before publication. I pretty much immediately wanted to read this book, the blurb on the back describes it as "a cross between the iconic 80's movie Sixteen Candles and the classic coming-of-age novel Looking for Alaska" (aka the as yet unreviewed book two).

I read Eleanor & Park in a couple days and am incredibly impressed with the quality of the writing. The basic story to me was pretty unoriginal. The super uncool girl gets the super cool guy (Sixteen Candles)... This book had the normal teenage shit, for example Eleanor's way of making friends: "because being assaulted by maxi pads is a great way to win friends and influence people." What impressed me though is that there is more to both of these kids than what is going on at school. They have more going on than angsty teenage crap. Eleanor is dealing with real issues. I enjoyed the way the author balanced the normal high school issues with the completely not-normal life Eleanor was living.

The biggest take-away for me from this book is that I am grateful for the things I have. Eleanor is dirt poor. She shares a bedroom with her FOUR younger siblings. She can't listen to the cassettes that Park gives her because she can't afford batteries. She brushes her teeth with salt and her finger because she doesn't have a toothbrush. And this doesn't even begin to cover the shit she goes through with her family. It made me reflect on the things that I take for granted. I tend to wish I had more a lot of the time, and this book made me reflect instead on the fortune of the things that I do have.