Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell

Synopsis:

Two misfits.

One extraordinary love.

Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.

Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.

Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

I ran into this book by pure chance. I was looking for Fangirl, but I couldn’t find it, no matter how many bookstores I checked, so I decided to meet Rainbow Rowell by Eleanor & Park instead. And it didn’t disappoint me a bit.

Eleanor & Park is a story about life. It shows us the worst part of it, but also the best one, and it’s both depressing and hopeful at the same time. Eleanor and Park are both so different, but also similar in so many ways. This book made me smile a lot, but it also made me sad so many times. There are all those hopeless scenes when you think everything, no matter how unfair it is, can’t be helped and I don’t know what to do about it. But then there’s another scene where everything, no matter how awkward, is better only because Eleanor and Park are together. They are just so brave, fighting to be together no matter what.

But then the ending arrives, and everything just breaks down into pieces. I don’t understand Eleanor. Then I cry. Then I still cannot understand. Why does it end like that? And then, last sentence, a trace of hope. The end. It’s like the whole novel had a pace, a getting-to-know-each-other pace, and then suddenly she’s gone and everything comes crashing down to the ending.

But I loved the book so much… Hope, dreams, disappointments, tears, laughs, music, comics, family, friendship, love…; the story is life. And we should all read a love story as hopeful and realistic as this one.