Eleanor & Park

In the beginning, the book was really great! I loved the perspective switched and the writing style was amazing. I loved the way that the author hinted at things and slowly revealed more and more about the characters. I also thought the humor was really well-written. I thought for sure it was going to be a five star read.

At about 15-20% I realized that the story and characters had a couple flaws, but it was still overall a pretty good story and the writing style was really saving it. I thought maybe it would be a four star.

Then, about half way through, the novelty of the writing style wore off and I was really starting to see through and flaws of the characters, especially Eleanor. Not to mention the fact that there were some side characters who were almost nothing but caricatures of stereotypes. So, maybe just a three star book.

When I got to about 60-70% of the way through the book, I just simply found Eleanor annoying. She was picking fights with Park and getting mad at him over pretty much nothing!! He would try to compliment her and she would twist his words around just to be mad at him. Also, some of the things she would say were just plain odd and borderline creepy. She would talk about how she wanted to bite Park's cheeks and “eat his face whole”. Weird. Two star.

Then, the ending. The ending actually wasn't that horrible. It was really sweet and gave the both of them sort of happy endings?? But when you really think about it, Eleanor is still being a bit of a jerk to a guy who did nothing but love her. He wrote her letters every single day and she read none of them. Nearly a year went by before she sent anything to him. It took a year of her not reading his letters and him not hearing anything in response (so, basically, no communication at all) for her to finally say “I love you.”

However, I actually really liked Park. He was one of my more favorite characters I've read about in a while. When he loved, he loved with his whole heart and he put others before himself in every situation he could. While a couple of the things he did were odd, I think that he was still a pretty great character. The fact that he was happy at the end sort of almost made up for everything Eleanor had done throughout pretty much the entire book. So. Three stars.

I think I went into this book with high hopes because I had previously read “Fangirl” by the same author and that is probably one of my all-time favorite books. Not to mention, I just finished reading “Red Queen” right before I read this one and not many books deserved to be compared to that one.

Overall... meh.

Ps. I really don't understand the whole subplot about Park needing to learn to drive shift. It just seems unnecessary and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm sure it's symbolic of something, but I genuinely cannot tell what.