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.
“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something."
Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park, set in the 1980s, is a high school romance between two sixteen-year-olds misfits. Now this may sound off-putting to most people, but this book, although not wholly different from other high school romance stories, is worth a read.
Eleanor, with her rather distracting red hair and unfortunate dress sense, might as well be holding up a sign saying "PICK ON ME." Though she was maddeningly stupid at times, she was quite an endearing character. Park was never a victim of bullying, but was a clear misfit due to the fact that he was half-Korean in a predominantly white school. His home life, in contrast to Eleanor's dangerously unstable one, was almost perfect apart from a bit of nagging by his dad.
The book's beginning was relatively slow-paced, and focused on the gradual development of Eleanor and Park's relationship. There was no love at first sight, rather, a progression from strangers, to friends, to lovers. Of course, as soon as their relationship progressed to the "love" stage, they were all "I live for you," and "I don't think I can breathe when we're not together." (although this IS an accurate portrayal of high-schoolers in love).
Call me soulless and stone-hearted, but I loved the ending. It was PAINFUL, but it was realistic.
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