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Written by Josh More
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Wednesday, 09 April 2008 02:33 |
OK, seriously, how I could pass up a book with a title like The Perks of Being a Wallflower? Especially after I read the back and it painted a picture of a shy, gawky and confused highschool kid who had to deal with similar issues that I did during that time?
Well, at least that's what I thought I'd be reading. It started out good enough. The writing is amusing, and some of the teenage "insights" were downright hilarious. There were also a few bits here and there that were amazingly well done and surprisingly painful.
However, taken as a whole, it's a bit too busy and I lost the believability near the end. I don't doubt that a great many intelligent kids have social difficulties in high school (I know that my own experiences were... suboptimal)...
However, the concept that, in the course of one year, a kid can learn about sex and masturbation, get addicted to tobacco, experiment with marijuana and LSD, overcome his own self-esteem problems, deal with child molestation, witness a rape, witness physical abuse, deal with an abortion, have his first drink, etc etc etc... well, it seems contrived. (As is the concept of a kid that gets to be freshman, knows about sex, but has never masturbated before.)
Let me just say that a person can be interesting and have emotional issues resulting from intelligence and poor social skills without having to have been physically or sexually abused. It gets tiresome to read books where such a situation either launches the character on their journey, or (in the case of this book) it becomes a surprise twist at the end.
This book would have been so much better had the kid just been a really bright kid who "didn't get it". There's ample drama and angst in a normal well-adjusted teenager that it's unnecessary to create especially painful experiences for the reader. In many ways, this seems to be the easy way out.
The format is one that is easy to do wrong (collection of letters), but works in this case because the writing style is believable for the type of character writing it... and it's all written by one person, so you don't have the problem of tracking dialogue that often results such such a format.
All in all, the writing is good, and there are some very well written and evocative bits. However, I don't recommend that anyone make it a point to read this one. More importantly, I don't recommend that any angsty teenagers read it at all... it's not likely to help (and could well hinder).
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