(CAUTION: This post contains spoilers. LOTS of spoilers)
I’ve been a bookworm ever since I learned how to read. In my mind, books are windows to the world. They show us how people really are, they give us hope, and most importantly they inspire us. This is why whenever I find a book that really resonates with me, I just have to tell other people about it so that they’ll read it and hopefully enjoy the book as well (also so we can fangirl over the characters together).
Last summer, I read Eleanor and Park for the first time and immediately fell in love with it. This summer I found it in a bargain bin at Books-A-Million and decided relive the joy. I don’t really read any young adult novels aside from some occasional John Green, but I had heard glowing reviews about the book so I figured I’d give it a whirl. In its own nostalgic and quirky way, I feel like it properly holds it own as a love story. Through the novel, Rainbow Rowell shows the reader that it’s possible to believe in something pure and have it stay pure.
The book is set in 1986 in Omaha, Nebraska. Eleanor Douglas is new to the area, having been kicked out of her home by her step-father, Richie, one year prior. On the bus ride to her first day at her new school, she faces the unenviable task of trying to find a seat. After everyone that she passes refuses to let her sit with them and just as she’s on the brink of tears, Park Sheridan reluctantly lets her sit with him in his seat.
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One of the many things that I love about this book is that Eleanor and Park, at least from the way that they’re described phyiscally, don’t look like they would go together in real life. But somehow, some way, Rowell made it work. Eleanor is described as having a curly mane of red hair, being somewhat heavyset, and dressing strangely. I’m talking wearing men’s ties in her hair and attaching curtain tassels to her clothes weird.
But that’s basically where their love story begins. One of the things that I loved about Eleanor and Park’s relationship was that it evolved so easily. Right there in their seat at the back of the bus. Their relationship evolves from bitter silence to comfortable silence, comfortable silence to sharing comic books, and from comics to music. If you’re a fan of bands like The Smiths and retro MTV, the references in this book will take you all the way back to the plaid couch in your parent’s finished basement.
As if their physical appearances weren’t enough to set them apart, they come from two completely different home situations. Eleanor lives with her mother, stepfather, and four siblings in a two bedroom clapboard house. There is barely enough space for them all to function happily in and the family is barely able to get by. Conversely, Park lives a typical, wholesome, middle class life with his parents and younger brother. His father is of Irish descent and his mother is Korean. Parks ethnicity doesn’t really play an important part in the plot, but there is a lot of emphasis on it when Eleanor describes him in her head (“stupid cute Asian kid”).
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For a while things are great between them and they’re blissfully happy and in love. That is, until Eleanor’s step-father finds out that she’s been seeing a boy in the neighborhood and throws a fit around their small house while Eleanor is away with Park. She comes home and sees the numerous mixtapes that Park has made broken, the makeup (a gift from Park’s mother) strewn everywhere, and discovers by his scraggly handwriting that it was her stepfather who was writing perverted notes to her on the covers of her textbooks.
Seeing that she’s no longer safe in the home that was never hers to begin with, she and Park run away in the middle of the night so that she can seek refuge at her uncle’s house in St. Paul, Minnesota. Knowing all the while that she would ultimately have to leave him, Park drives her in the stick shift truck that his father had been trying to teach him with great disdain to drive throughout the book.
When she’s gone, Park sends her letter after letter and mixtape after mixtape hoping for a reply, but she never does. Sophomore year turns into junior year and then comes prom. The previous year, he asked Eleanor to go to prom with him (when the time came for them to go, of course) and she unwillingly said yes, dreading the task of telling him that she wouldn’t be able to afford a dress and other girly-prom luxuries. He ends up going with another girl, having an ok time, and pouring himself into bed at the end of the night.
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The next day he wakes up to his father dropping a postcard on his chest. It’s from Eleanor and besides the address, she only wrote three words.
The ending is what truly messed me up inside and tugged at my heart strings. You start to really feel sorry for Park because of his desperation at holding on to Eleanor, but then she finally responds to him. Months after the letters and tapes have stopped coming, she responds to him with three words.
I highly suggest that everyone read this book even if it is a “young adult” fiction novel.
This was intended to be a review of the book, but it just turned into word vomit on a computer screen. That’s okay, because hopefully now you understand just how beautiful and pure a first love can be, how it happens so easily and goes almost undetected. But most importantly how it’s worth fighting for.
