Eleanor and Park

Author: Raimbow Rowell

Genre: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary.

Editorial: St. Martin’s Griffin

Year: 2013

Ranking: 4,7/ 5

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.

The Author

Rainbow Rowell is an American author of young adult and adult contemporary novels. Her young adult novels Eleanor & Park and Fangirl both received a great deal of critical acclaim in 2013.

Rowell's first published novel was Attachments in 2011, a contemporary romantic comedy about a company's IT guy who falls in love with a woman whose email he has been monitoring. In 2013 Rowell published two young adult novels: Eleanor & Park and Fangirl. Both were chosen by The New York Times as being some of the best young adult fiction of the year. Eleanor & Park was also chosen by Amazon as one of the 10 best books of 2013, and as Goodreads' best young adult fiction of the year. Rowell's fourth novel is a contemporary adult novel about a marriage in trouble; it is titled Landline and was released on July 8, 2014. 

Personal Experience with this Book

Since reading Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell became one of those authors which I want to read every book they have written. That was how "Eleanor and Park" came to me. And how good it was that I decided to read all her novels! I enjoyed Eleanor and Park, as well as her other books. I think even I enjoyed it more than the others. It is definitely my favorite book of Rainbow Rowell.

The story of Eleanor and Park is based on the 80s. I found very interesting being able to read a love story set in an era with so little technology. Especially since we are now so used to it and it is so easy to reach other people through the internet that is hard to imagine how couples kept in touch when not everyone could have a cell phone or home phone. Even when people could not have reached music so easily became a very important factor in this love story, it made it feel real and very interesting to me.

I enjoyed the romance between the two characters. Well it is the center of the whole story and, one would think that because of that the book can be boring at some point, but it is not. They are a lovely couple. They are in an age when first love is experienced. This one is so unique and important to the life of a teen that it marks you on your adulthood. This is a love without traces of other ugly feelings that one have from past relationships, that is so sweet and so innocent that one is able to give everything for the other.

Park loves Eleanor like he has never loved anyone. She also loves him but is afraid. This is because both have seen different things in their families. Eleanor's story is a bit more complicated than Park’s and that makes it more difficult in terms of relying on others, her self-esteem is somehow low and she sometimes cannot believe that Park really has liked someone like her. Park meanwhile is so in love and so confused by the reactions of Eleanor that sometimes is hard for him to understand her. For him, only she exists and the fact of being beside her is the only thing that can make him happy.

The writing of Rainbow Rowell has always being beautiful to me. I have said several times that I like to read her books because when I read them I feel they are a light reading. You do not get tired of her stories, her characters are so real that you feel as if they were your neighbors or people close to your life, and you can spend all day reading a book from her without realizing how long have you been sitting there. I think that captivates the reader a lot, or at least it does me.

I cannot speak more about the plot of the book but I must say that as a reader I felt many things when I finish it. It was like an internal shock and I did not know what to do with my life. It is a book that marks you. You want the story to continue and you cannot believe It finished at the point where it did. However, you feel happy and satisfied because you witnessed a love like that. That’s what happened to me when I finished the book.

Keep in mind that you have to be patient with Eleanor. Her character is quite annoying sometimes but I tried to put myself in her shoes and understand her environment in order to understand her behavior. And you have to be prepared for a book that will make you feel tickling in the stomach, often leave you with a smile on your face and make you cry two or three times during the whole story.

I highly recommend it. Anyone who likes romance will like be story.