So, deadline #3 (or 4, 5, can't remember) is for the last day in February. Even though I'm back in school, I know I can finish it.
On to today's post. A couple of days ago, I checked out Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. I read it nonstop for the most part and finished it in a day. I haven't finished a book in one sitting for a long time. I loved the book, though I had a few problems with Hannah, the girl at the center of the story. Here's my review of the book posted from goodreads:
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay AsherMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Clay Jensen comes home from school one day and finds a package, the size of a shoebox, outside his door. It's addressed to him. Clay opens the package and finds seven audiotapes. Excited, he goes into the garage in search of his father's stereo. He pops the first tape in. He presses play. He listens.
The voice that comes up is Hannah Baker. A girl he crushed on. A girl he kissed. A girl that killed herself by taking pills.
Of course he's shocked to hear the voice that belongs to a dead girl. But the tape plays and we find out that Hannah has created thirteen stories of various people that both tormented her and tried to help her. There are only two rules: Listen to the tapes and pass them on to the next person on the list. If they do not follow these rules, copies of the seven tapes would be made public.
What follows is a sometimes suspenseful, mostly exhausting look into Hannah's reasons into committing suicide. Clay steals a Walkman from Tony, a friend, and ventures around his town that's void of life save a few stragglers; his caring mother, an outcast girl, and two boys attached to the tapes in various ways. At times Clay's following the map Hannah had slipped into his locker days before she died. He's visiting scenes in the tapes: Hannah's old house that was the site of an accident; a park; a couple of houses where parties were thrown; favorite hangout spots.
The tapes takes us through Hannah's first kiss, which ruins her reputation, to her last kiss that may have saved her life. We hear classmates' names pop up on the tapes, see Clay have one memory of them and have Hannah contradict it. At one point in the story, Clay wonders if anyone will be the same after these tapes. Of course they won't.
While reading the book, I felt like Clay. I'll read a little bit, he'll listen to a few more seconds of Hannah's stories. We'll stop, tell ourselves that we can't possibly finish this in one setting (we both did). Yet I'll go back to reading and the tapes start over again. When Clay stops the tapes so that he can "catch up" or when he says the he's tired, not physically but emotionally, I understand exactly what he means.
Clay can be like a moviegoer, screaming at the victim on the screen and warning them what everyone else knows what's going to happen. Hannah would narrate one event that happened in her life and Clay's thoughts and actions would cut into it. It's sometimes painful to read, especially at the end when Hannah's last attempts at having someone reach her fails. "It's not a question, Mr. Porter. Don't take it as one... Tell her you're going to help her." "Do not let her leave that room!"
At times I felt like I was reading Saw in prose, wondering, whenever a new tape was introduced, whom wronged Hannah this time. This tape can't possibly be any worse than the last one. But it is and Hannah narrates most of the tapes with a calm voice tinged with anger. And it's that voice that left me, for most of the novel, unattached to Hannah Baker.
Hannah is possibly the only weakness of this page-turning novel. She relates her reasons on the tapes in a virtually emotionless tone. It's odd that the tapes themselves made Hannah, in her own words and voice, just as manipulative as the ones that wronged her. She came across as a showman, taking her time in unraveling some stories. Prolonging the mentioning of someone's name to torment them. She involves people in the tapes that had nothing to do with her suicide- her own words -so that she can apologize to them. Arguably, she deserves the role of maestro giving what she went through.
However, I felt that Hannah's reasons why for committing suicide weren't emotional enough, which is an awful sentence to write. In researching suicide, I know that some reach that rode in both complicated and seemingly simplistic reasons. One of the last things you'd want to say to someone whom suffers depression is that their reasons for being suicidal are weak. Yet Hannah's didn't phase me. Yes, there was a snowball effect. A boyfriends spreads a false reputation about her. A girl uses her. A boy takes photos of her in her bedroom. Several boys feel her up, create lists- "Best Ass in the Freshmen Class". She's so broken that she doesn't prevent a passed-out girl from being raped and allows the same rapist to do the same to her. But her voice prevents me from feeling enough. Maybe it's also the format of the story I mentioned before; one horrible incident after another. Of course it's believable. People don't commit suicide for one act, it's a series of acts yet I felt little emotional pull towards Hannah.
But I did feel something. Later in the story, Hannah talks about one of her favorite classes, Peer Communications. Their teacher has the class decorate bags and hang them up. Classmates are to write anonymous and complimentary notes to other classmates, dropping them into the recipients' bags. The notes are simple- "Did you like his performance in the school play?" -but it's what Hannah needs. Unfortunately, a scorned boy steals her notes. Hannah, in an act of desperation, writes a note and slips it into the teacher's bag that's used for students to suggest a discussion. Hannah's is on suicide. "Suicide. It's something I've been thinking about." The note is read out loud in class. Now's the time for someone to reach Hannah. But, one by one, the students only make her feel worse. "It's like whoever wrote this note just wants attention," one girl says. The other classmates' suggestions are "tinged with annoyance." Reading this scene, I was in as much disbelief as Hannah. I also felt sympathy when Hannah started to think of the methods of suicide before settling on painless pills.
But most of my sympathy was reserved for Clay and another boy in the story. Hannah knew how it felt when others hurt her, so why would she cause the same pain to those she admittedly did nothing wrong? It makes me hate Hannah in a way.
But I think the author knew that. Is Thirteen Reasons Why about Hannah's suicide or is more about the people it affected. The last scene in the book shows Clay at school, after mailing off the tapes to the next person on the list. He doesn't want to go to his English class, the class he shared with Hannah, and walks the hallways. A girl passes him in the hall, whispering "Sorry" and he recognizes her as Skye, the outcast girl. A girl that wasn't like that before. Instead of letting her walk away, he runs after her and calls her name.
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