Thirteen Reasons Why

Hannah Baker, a young teenager who suffers the consequences of being labeled cruelly, commits suicide based on the connections between her and thirteen people.  Before her suicide, Hannah records audiotapes and sends them to thirteen people that she considers guilty for her death. Thirteen Reasons Why reveals the contents of the tapes piece by agonizing piece.  Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why gripped my attention and induced a horrified yet fascinated feeling within me.

The story takes place in modern day and partly in the high school of a fairly small town.  I easily related to the location and was drawn into the plot a little deeper because of my understanding.  But the story is not limited to the school.  Along with the tapes, each of the thirteen people has received a map from Hannah indicating important places around town where parts of her story have taken place.  These locations include houses where a couple parties occurred as well as a couple restaurants that Hannah used to visit.

Jay Asher wrote the novel in the first person view of Clay Jenson, a fellow student who had a crush on Hannah. Most of the novel, however, is the dialogue of Hannah coming from the tapes Clay is listening to.  This proved to be a clever approach at telling the story of one who is dead through their point of view.

Hannah Baker is a normal kid whose fresh start in a new town dilapidates when someone puts her name under the ‘slut’ category at school.  Hannah tries to make friends and succeeds only to lose them.  Her parents become involved in their work more than their daughter, and Hannah’s life becomes very lonely.  Clay Jenson is known as ‘the nice guy’ and his reputation lacks a single flaw.  He is kind to everyone.  Yet however curious of Hannah and attracted to her he is, he is fearful that her reputation may be true and is scared to talk to her because of this.

Each recipient of the tapes is taught a very valuable lesson.  This lesson, which is the obvious theme of the book, seems to bluntly teach us to always value other people and to be kind to them no matter what their reputation is or what rumors about them exist.  Seemingly, none of the thirteen people picked by Hannah have utilized this morality towards her.  They have let her unfair reputation and false rumors decide their treatment of her.     

            But Clay doesn’t understand why the tapes have reached him.  He has done nothing wrong to Hannah.  Though as he begins to listen and her story untangles itself, he sees the real Hannah and why she did what she did.  People betrayed her and tragedies struck.  The signs of her suicide were apparent, and no one paid attention.  The novel is depressing, but readers are grateful to see the guilty people confronted.

            Thirteen Reasons Why reminded me of The Virgin Suicides because both novels told the bitterness of teenage suicides and the effects they have upon other people.  Thirteen Reasons Why was a fantastic read despite its somberness.  I recommend the read to female teenagers like myself because we can understand Hannah’s feelings perfectly.  This tale captured me and I don’t doubt that you will find the same effect. 

288 pages.

25 Things I've Learned From Batesville

Batesville, Arkansas has taught me so many important lessons. I've decided to share a few with you!

25 Things I've Learned From Living In Batesville:

1. Hunting and fishing makes you a real man.

2. Being thirty-five years old does not prohibit you from acting like a high schooler.

3. If you're undecided about seeing a controversial movie, don't worry because it won't play here.

4. Don't worry about missing you're school bus-there's twenty more that will go by your house.

5. If you tell someone you're a vegan, they'll assume you're an occupant of the planet Vegano.

6. There's plenty of good restaurants here if you don't care what the food tastes like.

7. Trick or treating is satanic.

8. Trick or trunking is the coolest way to get candy.

9. Having platinum blonde hair with really dark roots is 'the thing'.

10. Don't worry about missing teeth!

11. You can cut hair for a living without any training.

12. The only vegan food here is tofu.

13. Dollar General is a great store, but Fred's is even better.

14. Obesity is not a bad thing.

15. Having more children in order to obtain more government assistance is cool.

16. You can make more money on disability than you would having a job.

17. If DHS takes your kids away, just have some more.

18. Reading is a waste of time.

19. Reading the Batesville Guard will make you smarter.

20. Don't spay or neuter your pets-they have plenty of places to roam.

21. You don't really have to know how to drive in order to get your license. 

22. Blinkers on cars are optional.

23. The smell of a chicken plant actually induces hunger.

24. Sonic makes for a good date night.

25.  You can sell food stamps for cash.

Carrie

Carrie By Stephen King

  Carrie is a classic horror novel about a teenage girl with telekinesis.  The eerie story, however, trickles into disappointing idiocy.  The climax induces readers with a feeling of disgust for the lameness of King's erratic creativity.  Stephen King's Carrie grudgingly endures with an overrated, absurd story line.

King wrote Carrie with a seemingly over-simplistic style that leaves much to be imagined by the reader.  Details are present but scarce.  I was not impressed with the writing technique and found myself bored.  King's creativity was ruined by over-dramatization  and the stereotyping of important characters.  His story did not really disgust me, though, until the part in which Carrie begins blowing up everything with her mind and killing her mother without lifting a finger.  At this point, my suspension of disbelief disintegrated because the characters were unrealistic and, obviously, the story was spiraling into oblivion.  

Carrie, who has always been the super-religious 'freak' everyone picks on, is a decently developed character in the book.  She portrays emotions appropriately through her measly dialogue. Her mother is completely psychotic and obsessed with the bible and avoiding everything that could possibly be considered sinful.  Carrie's fellow high school students include Sue Snell, a sympathetic, typical, and very popular girl, Sue's athletic and, also, popular boyfriend, Tommy, and Chris, the girl most notorious for tormenting Carrie.  Together, they are the formula for the crazed tale in which Carrie finally snaps. 

The story opens in the school girl's shower room right after P.E. class.  Carrie, slumping naked in the shower with visible pimples and fat rolls, abruptly has her first period.  The sixteen-year-old is shocked because her mother, who thinks periods are sins, has never taught her a single thing about menstruation.  Carrie begins screaming and all of the other girls start to tease her by throwing tampons and chanting at her.  Eventually, the coach rushes to the scene and aids Carrie, and the girls are all punished. Sue Snell, who joined the others in the torment, now regrets her actions and wants to apologize to Carrie by getting her popular boyfriend, Tommy, to ask Carrie to prom.  After a slight hesitation during which distrust enters Carrie, she accepts.  But Chris, highly annoyed by the situation, to say the least, produces a vicious plan to attack Carrie.  The plan works, but the effects are deadly.

Carrie is mediocre at best and ridiculously dumb at least.  The book was similar to the the movie Frailty, in which an insanely religious father becomes a serial killer because he believes it is "God's way" and passes his belief to one of his sons, which is like Carrie's mother making Carrie into an insanely religious and superstitious person like herself. I recommend this novel to those who have trouble reading well or just want to be reminded that not every book can be great. 

The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides By Jeffrey Eugenides

 

The Virgin Suicides depicts the morbid story of five sisters who each commit suicide in a single year.  The book is a classic fiction, written from the perspective of their neighbor, an anonymous male within his group of spellbound friends.  Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides managed to captivate all of my senses with fascinating despair.

 

Eugenides' writing style is like a fictional memior of everything the anonymous boy sees of the Lisbon girls.  The book is written in first person plural, so that the boy refers to his group instead of himself.  Occasionally, he uses 'we' and 'us' only to reveal the group's obsession with the girls.  The story manages to hover only around the sisters' experiences and actions but never completely penetrates into their thoughts.  The boy tells his group's ideas of what the girls' thoughts might be, but the audience can never be certain.  This lack of intimacy with the main character's thoughts is made up for with an ample amount of detail regarding the girls' posessions, their behaviors, their parents' behaviors, and so forth.  This keeps readers curious and absorbed in a very realistic point of view.  I enjoyed and admired Eugenides' mysterious style.

 

The Lisbon sisters consist of 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese.  Cecilia has always been the peculiar one with a great imagination.  But, being the odd one is very difficult for her; She doesn't quite fit in with her sisters, and she has no friends.  This is the assumed reason for her depression.  The other sisters are generally displayed as fairly normal and happy before Cecilia's depression and, ultimately, suicide.  However, they, too, spiral downward shortly after.  All of their visible behavior is described acutely.  Mr. Lisbon, the girls' father, works at their school as a teacher, a position frustrating for the girls. 

The story takes place in a quiet suburb of Detroit in 1993.  The Lisbon's community is a town innocent to much tragedy.  The Lisbon's neighbors are deeply affected by the girls' suicides, and many of them move after the occurrence.  The book's words do not lie among the neighbors so much, though, as they do the confounded and intense emotions of adolescence.  The world in which the story takes place is the world of the Lisbon sisters, who travel only to school and are, otherwise, trapped in their ruining home.  The depiction of the Lisbon home conjures nasty images of stale food rotting upon layers of dust and junk strewn about in a decaying setting.

The plot immediately captures the audience.  The tale begins when Cecilia first attempts suicide by slitting her wrists. When this effort proves to be of no avail,  she tosses herself out the upstairs window so that she plummets onto the fence pole and dies, finally.  This ignites each of her sister's depressions.  The girls stop leaving the house, and they start to become more trapped all the time. Lux begins smoking cigarettes in the bathroom.  Eventually, the anonymous boy and a few of his friends are able to take the sisters to one last homecoming.  Their time is enjoyed, and Lux ends up kissing her date, Trip.  Only a short time passes before Lux is making love upon her roof with various men almost every night.  The girls, then, stop attending school altogether because of their horrible, worsening melancholy.  In the end, they free themselves from their miserable traps.

The Virgin Suicides reminded me slightly of Girl Interrupted because both tell dismal, captivating stories of female groups experiencing phycological disorders. I was suprised by Eugenides' engrossing story, and I recommend the book especially to all teenage girls. The Virgin Suicides, however, should not have a limited audience. This is a must read for people of either gender and all ages!

The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man By H.G. Wells

The Invisible Man is an exciting, science fiction story of a man who becomes invisible, of course, only to find large disadvantages that force him to insanity.  His story is told vividly and magnificently.  H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man instills a lingering curiosity in the reader with its remarkable adventures and articulate writing style.

 

The story takes place in Iping and a few other villages in England during the late eighteen-hundreds.  H.G. Wells uses a style of writing that parks the audience in this period of time and place.  He accomplishes this by often using the slang of the setting and by writing the dialogue the way it actually would have been said.  For example, when one citizen speaks of the invisible man he says, in his English accent, "What's 'e been doin', then? Ain't hurt the girl, 'as 'e? Run at 'en with a knife, I believe' No 'ed, I tell ye. I don't mean no manner of speaking, I mean marn 'ithout a 'ed! Narnsense!" This type of dialogue reveals much about the type of people and their culture.

 

The charcters exhibited throughout the book do not vary by much.  The invisible man himself, who we learn is actually a doctor named Griffin, is, by far, the most intelligent character.  Why he becomes so frustrated with his position is very obvious.  However, the audience loses sympathy for Griffin when his temper is utterly lost and his rampage begins.

 

The story starts in a small village where the stranger, Griffin, arrives.  He is scrutinized by the village's people for his suspicious outfit, which covers every inch of his invisible body.  He orders a room and lives there for a while.  All the time he is there, he is carrying out dubious experiments.  Griffin loses his temper occasionally and crashes are heard.  Eventually, he reveals that he is invisible.  He races off and runs into a man named Thomas Marvel, who he forces to aid him.  Griffin ends up fleeing to a random home when he is shot.  The home belongs to Doctor Kemp, a man that Griffin attended school with.

 

The book advocates a very significant theme: Be happy with what you have.  The idea of invisibilty conjures up a tempting array of advantages and possibilities. Yet, the moment the man achieves his irresistable goal, he is abruptly doomed to numerous disadvantages he overlooked.  These disadvantages drastically outweigh any of the benefits he once thought were so great.

 

The Invisible Man is science fiction at its best.  The plot progresses nicely, revealing only as much at a time to satisfy the reader and keep them reading.  I recommend this read especially to fans of science fiction, mistery or suspense.  However, this book is a very popular classic and everyone should read it.