Book Title: Eleanor & Park.
Author: Rainbow Rowell.
Published: 2012.
Eleanor & Park follows teenage girl Eleanor, with crazy red hair and holes in her clothes as she moves to a new school where she meets Park, the complete opposite.
This book is all kind of emotions. It takes you back to being a teenager and first getting to know your boyfriend's family and spending all your time together and at their house but also the feeling of going home, back to reality.
The characters in this book are some of my favourite of all time. I found myself so invested in their lives and their love story. Park was written in a very real way, where he seemed like the kid that was in your school class that was quiet but cool and you kind of had a crush on because of that. Eleanor however gave you a kind of insight into the life of the kind of 'trampy' kid who you kind of just assumed was a chav.
There weren't many faults in this book. Rainbow Rowell wrote the story beautiful, simply yet powerfully. The story was very captivating. The whole book was full of poetic quotes such as "She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down deja vu". However, there were some times when the book offended me in many ways and that was when it was describing or talking about Park, who was cast as half Korean. I found some of the comments made were very racist and just generally in bad taste which definitely put me off - on the other-hand I also appreciated that the story spoke a PoC even if it was only slightly.
Something that I liked most about this book and I found quite unique was how the the story switched between Eleanor and Parks perspective. Where as some books may have alternative chapters dedicated to the character, Rowell made the decision to combine the characters but switch between then which I found very refreshing.
Overall, Eleanor and Park ended up as one of those books that reminded me of how reading can make you feel. It had been a long time since I hadn't been able to put a book down. The story had romance, youth, mystery and quirks. I left the book without the book leaving me, I thought about it for weeks afterwards.
