Review: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

 

Eleanor & Park is a (beautiful) book by Rainbow Rowell, first published in 2012 by Orion Books.

Park and Eleanor are two very, very different people. 

Park is the boy at the (near) back of the bus. He tries to make himself invisible, and it works. Until Eleanor comes along.

Eleanor is the new girl in town, she has chaotic, red hair and a wild personality. There is no way she can make herself invisible.

But despite this, Eleanor and Park slowly, steadily fall in love. Two very different people come together, through comic books and mix tapes. They fall in love the way you do when you're young, and you feel as though you have nothing and everything to lose.

♥

Holding Eleanor's hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive. 

As soon as he touched her, he wondered how he'd gone this long without doing it. He rubbed his thumb through her palm up her fingers, and was aware of her every breath.

Park had held hands with girls before. Girls at Skateland. A girl at the ninth-grade dance last year. (They'd kissed while they waited for her dad to pick them up.) He'd even held Tina's hand, back when they 'went' together, back in the sixth grade. 

And always, before, it had been fine. Not much different from holding Josh's hand when they were little kids crossing the street. Or holding his grandma's hand when she took him to church. Maybe a little sweatier, a little more awkward. 

When he'd kissed that girl last year, with his mouth dry and his eyes mostly open, Park had wondered if maybe there was something wrong with him. 

He'd even wondered - seriously, while he was kissing her, he'd wondered this - whether he might be gay. Except he didn't feel like kissing any guys either. And if he thought about She-Hulk or Storm (instead of this girl, Dawn) the kissing got a lot better.

Maybe I'm not attracted to real girls, he'd thought at the time. I'm some sort of perverted cartoon-sexual.

Or maybe, he thought now, he just didn't recognize all those other girls. The way a computer drive will spit our a disk if it doesn't recognize the formatting. 

When he touched Eleanor's hand, he recognized her. He knew.

 ♥

If I'm completely honest here, this part of the review is not going to give this amazing book enough credit. Trust me, I want to give credit where it's due, and Eleanor & Park is due so much more. 

I want to tell you that I read this book in under a day (because I did), but I don't think that says much about the book itself. Yes, I loved it enough to want to read on and on ASAP, but I also loved The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and I read that over a period of days.

Anyway, I love books that are full of cliches and romance, you may have gathered that from me by now. And this book was perfect. 

I'm not going to lie, this book wasn't all happiness and bouncing lambs. But it was perfect, that way. The struggles shown by Eleanor's life were real, and without them the happy parts wouldn't balance properly. You need the dark to be able to see the light.

And that is exactly what this book does, and how it works. It is full of struggle and sadness, but also love, and the most important thing of all - hope. It is full of hope.

As I truly believe I still do not give this book enough justice, I am going to tell you why I picked it in the first place. I picked it partly because, well, RAINBOW. And I picked it because I really, really love the cover. (I'm like that.)

But, I wanted to read this book most of all due to John Green's snippet review on the front cover, and I am going to end with this, because I think it describes the book way beyond my abilities. 

'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'

-Beth

Happy Reading!♥