Eleanor and Park - Rainbow Rowell

Something that really angers me is when people patronise young people in the arts.  Whether it is people like Mary Whitehouse trying to censor Doctor Who or Colorado school boards attempting to ban the reading of John Green’s Looking for Alaska, there seems no shortage of old people, in the name of ‘protecting the innocence of the innocent’ attempting to prevent young people from being exposed to some of the hard realities in this world.  Wrapping people in cotton-wool does them no good and risks creating literature for young people that is so bland that they will never be captivated by the wonderful world of literature.

Young Adult literature has a tremendous duty to produce work aimed at younger readers that does not shy away from the controversial, the cruel or from what will make them cry and there are many books out there that do not fulfil this basic need.  Thankfully, there are a few that do step up and one such is this weeks book: Rainbow Rowell’s Eleaonor and Park.

Occasionally a book comes along that just takes your breath away; something so good, so powerful that you cannot stop thinking about it.  These do not come along everyday, making them all the more special when they do appear.  This is one such book.  This is a book about first love between two social outcasts.  So far, so ordinary.  Park is a half-Korean in-betweener, not hugely popular, but not an outcast either.  He comes from a loving family (ish) and mainly just tries to get through the day without causing too much of a fuss.  This all changes when a new girl comes onto his school bus.  

Eleanor is a truly wonderful character - wonderfully fleshed and nuanced.  She is a 'big' girl, not unhealthily so, but enough to attract comment in our rather judgemental world.  Her home life is hell.  Her step-father is abusive to her mother, her mother is a shadow of her old self and is getting by the best she can - but is weak.  Her father is uninterested.  Her siblings are cowed.  She is alone in a tiny house in a room shared by all her siblings.  She has no escape.  That is until Park comes along.

I am not going to say too much about the plot of the book because you NEED to read it to believe it.  Suffice to say it is far from just another YA love story.  It contains all of the usual ingredients: late-teen boy and girl, difficult high school, parents in the way etc.  But the story is all about the obstacles; the roadblocks placed in the way by society.  They are forced to confront situations that frankly no one should have to face, but least of all people so young.  The description of the abuse suffered by Eleanor at home and at school is close to harrowing.

The style of the story is a dual POV with Eleanor and Park telling alternately the story in a chronological manner.  This works brilliantly as it gives you the sense that you are getting two different novels at once - indeed she could have released the two halves separately and they still would have stood up.  They tell the stories from a position of love and understanding, but also from the fact that they have very different perspectives due to their wildly divergent upbringing.

There is swearing and Rowell doesn't pull her punches in her description of the horror of Eleanor's home-life, but it would be criminal to say this was not suitable for young readers, though maybe not pre-teens.  There is horror in this world: fear and pain, but simply veiling the eyes of the young from it will only make them ignorant of it when it eventually confronts them.  This book is a testament to how love conquers all and how bravery defeats fear, and to reject it just because it says 'fuck' every now would be just the most terrible shame.

Rowell is a very gifted writer, and the way she weaves the story of abuse and fear around this truly beautiful love story is really quite something.  Her characters are sometimes brutal, but never caricatures or stereotypes.  They are recognisable but unique.  This story is quite simply brilliant.  I never thought that I would read a YA adult story as sad and as beautiful as The Fault in Our Stars.  This is as good and then some.

I don't care what you are reading or what you are interested in.  You have to read this book and I mean right now!

9/10

Favourite Quotes

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

“You saved me life, she tried to tell him. Not forever, not for good. Probably just temporarily. But you saved my life, and now I'm yours. The me that's me right now is yours. Always.” 

“Don't bite his face, Eleanor told herself. It's disturbing and needy and never happens in situation comedies or movies that end with big kisses.” 

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Sisterland - Curtis Sittenfeld

Many thanks to Transworld Publishers for giving me a review copy off NetGalley

Everyone loves a trier; it is not always enough to do just enough, or even to excel at the things we do well – we need to do more.  It is seen as being brave to do this; a noble charge to go beyond the call of duty and try to do as much as you can.  This can, however, become problematic when it comes to the arts.  Try too much here and things can lose focus and edge.  Of course you want to create something multi-faceted, but there is a line, however hard is sometimes to see and even harder to judge – and Sisterland is right on it.

Sisterland is American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s fourth book and is the tale of a pair of twins: Daisy (who also goes by Kate) and Vi who, for want of a better word, have psychic powers.  It is a story of their lives, from birth to the present day, and shows how these powers affected them, and how two people with such similarities can grow to be such different people, and yet be so similar at the same time.

The story-telling is split between flashbacks that are chronological from their birth and forwards to a few years behind the present, and the story happening in the present where Vi has predicted a massive earthquake to hit their city of St Louis and the drama that occurs from this.  The story flits between them at whim, keeping you on your toes, and contrasting the changing relationship between the sisters in the present and in the past.

Daisy is the ‘normal’ one of the two.  She grows up as a fairly typical teenager, struggling to fit in and finding solace in her serial monogamous relationships with guys she doesn’t hugely like but make her feel safe.  In the present she is a suburban stay-at-home mum with 2.4 kids and a picket fence who spends her life caring for those kids.  To distance herself from her childhood, which was not particularly happy, she goes by her middle name of Kate and given that she takes her husband’s name after being married, this means she has an all-new name in the present – symbolic of her attempts to leave her past behind. 

She is the narrator of the story and this is one the books great strengths.  Kate is not perfect.  I don’t mean that she is basically perfect but makes mistakes thanks to misunderstandings; I mean that in many ways she is actually quite prejudiced and often acts in a malicious way.  She is still a very sympathetic character, but she is greatly flawed, making her a far more interesting character.

Vi is the more eccentric.  Unlike Kate who is ashamed of her powers and tries to wish them away, she embraces them and even makes a career out of them.  She is a little frustrating at times, both for the characters and for the reader, but she is genuine, if selfish.  She was the wild-child of the two: college dropout, drinking and drugs but now is tamer.  Her announcement that an earthquake was to destroy the city forces the two together.

The ‘psychic’ powers that they have are dealt similarly to how Henry’s time-shifting powers are dealt with in Audrey Niffenegger’s brilliant The Time Traveller’s Wife.  This is far from a sci-fi/fantasy book – it is a book about family and relationships that happen to have an element of fantasy as a plot point.  It is left ambiguous how much control they have over it and how it generally manifests itself, though Vi talks of a mystical ‘Guardian’ that speaks to her.

For me the book is at its strongest when dealing with the story in the present.  The story of the media storm surrounding them as the country seems enthralled and amused at this curious tale brings out the differences in the two sisters and how they interact with the world.  It brings out the divisions in what seems otherwise to be a solid marriage and causes the past to collide with present.  The attempts of Kate to live a normal life as a parent of small children while this all goes on is really wonderful, and testament to an author with prodigious talent.  The story has many intermingled one-on-one relationships: Kate and Vi, Kate and her husband Jeremy, Jeremy and his colleague Courtney, Courtney and her stay-at-home husband Hank, and Hank and Kate.  These relationships are all very strong but are deeply personal between each pair and this leads to difficulties as sometimes others feel like they are on the outside looking in.

The flashbacks are vital to the story as they show how and why Kate and Daisy have changed over the years and have reached the position in which they find themselves in the present.  These are well dispersed throughout and are well told but I do feel there are rather too many of them.  Sometimes I feel like Sittenfeld had not decided which was the main part of the tale: the present or the past.  I happen to think that the present was more interesting and thus had to be supported by the flashbacks, but this was not really the case.

The biggest problem with this book, however, is  the amount of issues that Sittenfeld decides to chuck in.  She has a very interesting story here, about family relationships, about how twins can lead diverging lives, about the difficulties of juggling family responsibilities with parenting and living a life, not to mention the psychic powers and how to live with it in a skeptical world – yet she then tries to throw more things into the mix such as racial discrimination through her friend Hank as well as the ethics of abortion among other things.  The book just became a little less tight and lost crucial focus at a time when it really needed to be building to the big finish, and this is a big shame.

That said though I have to say this is still an impressive book.  The plot idea hit on a very interesting concept and this was executed very well.  The characters are rich and well developed and though the story does lack a little bit of realism with regard to the worldwide reaction to the prediction among other things, this can be overlooked.  What I found harder to overlook was some of the superfluous detail, but this does not fully detract from Sittenfeld’s deep breaking down of the dynamics of family life and of the folly of attempting to escape your childhood and your destiny.

7.5/10

Favourite Quotes

“She would say that we create our own reality – that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe”

“That was the nastiest, most elemental math, made no less ugly for its undeniability”

“We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.” 

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