Read This Thing: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Disclaimer: this is going to be a glowing, gushy review. I will not be critiquing this book, I will be squeeing over it - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I downloaded this book for two reasons, firstly because I saw it recommended in this Rookie Mag article, and I thought it sounded interesting, and secondly because when I then googled it the first thing that came up was this New York Times review of it by John Green where he says: "“Eleanor & Park” reminded me not just what it’s like to be young and in love with a girl, but also what it’s like to be young and in love with a book", and that is exactly how this book made me feel, too.

I don't read a lot of YA, and when I do I tend to feel a little embarrassed about it, it's a guilty pleasure. I also never read Romance. I mean, obviously, a lot of the things I read have romantic subplots, but if a book's primary genre is Romance, I am extremely unlikely to even look twice at it. So this book - a realistic, YA Romance, was a pretty big leap from my comfort zone but I decided to pick it up anyway and I am so glad I did.

I'm not going to bother discussing the plot here, because if I'm not giving anything away then it all sounds like pretty standard boy-meets-girl stuff, which I guess it is technically is, but it's also a lot deeper than that. The only way I know how to explain it is that this book snuck up on me and wormed its way into my heart. Normally when I read about teenagers falling in love, I find myself rolling my eyes a lot and thinking about how glad I am that I'm not a teenager any more, but reading Eleanor & Park I was just sitting there with a huge grin on myself, rooting for these two ~*misunderstood teenagers*~ to work it out.

This is going to sound a bit cheesey and personal - but Eleanor & Park reminded me of how it feels to be in love when you're a teenager, when you've never been hurt before and you think that no one will ever really understand the deeply special and unique love the two of you have for one another. With this book, you're not just seeing that phenomenon from the outside, reading it makes you feel like you're really living it.

There are two final things I want to mention about how great this book is. Firstly - the cover is adorable, but it's mostly adorable because it's so different to other YA covers, especially YA romance covers, and especially especially YA covers aimed at girls. Books like that typically get slapped with a miscellaneous object or with a picture of a girl with her face cropped out  (they like doing that, they think it's clever). But Eleanor & Park got a great cover and after all this talk about how gendered marketing for YA books is harmful to readers etc etc that's something I find really encouraging.  The other thing I wanted to say about how great this book is, is that it's really refreshing to read about characters who are a bit different than standard YA protagonists, because there's one thing that YA authors love to write about even more than vampires:

Specifically white, skinny, conventionally attractive characters. I'm obviously not saying there aren't any other books that feature minority or marginalised characters, but it's definitely a comparatively small number. In this book - Park is a half Korean boy who likes to wear make-up, and Eleanor is a plus-size girl who looks a little different to everyone else and suffers for it. To be honest it makes me sad that this is remarkable, but it is. There's a quote I've seen around (which I now can't find for the life of me, obviously) about how not seeing yourself reflected in the media is the quickest way to feel dehumanised...something like that anyway...so the characters in this book are another thing I find really encouraging, and that makes me really happy.