Thirteen Reasons Why- Jay Asher

My mom suggested this book to me after hearing about and reading it at the middle school where she works.  I am a sucker for well written books that are targeted at age groups below mine and after reading the summary thought it sounded interesting, so after Wolf Hall bombed so badly, I thought my brain could use the break.

Well, as it turns out I didn’t get much of one. Thirteen Reasons Why has quite a morbid subject matter, and was fairly upsetting, but bear with me on this one.  If you trusted me with Room and its weirdness, you can trust me on a teen book about suicide. 

From the very beginning of the book we know that Hannah Baker killed herself.  After days have passed, Clay Jenson, who went to school with Hannah and had a crush on her, receives a brown package full of cassette tapes with no return address. On these tapes is Hannah’s voice, explaining thirteen reasons why she gave up, thirteen people who contributed actions and words to the snowball effect that eventually caused her to take her life.  Each of these thirteen people will receive the tapes and listen to them before passing them on.  The book chronicles Clay as he listens to each recording, following a map that was given with the tapes to the places where significant events occurred, providing us with Hannah’s running commentary interspersed with Clay’s reactions. This was not unlike an audio tour at a museum, which is where the author got the idea for this writing style.

Most of all I enjoyed the style of writing in this book, it was a genius idea from Asher to cut the present day thoughts Clay was having with Hannah’s discussions about life and high school.  In addition, although it was a serious and morose subject matter, at no point did Asher take it to a deeply psychological perspective, instead merely documenting the events that lead to Hannah’s depression.  It was a page turner for sure, and I think given more free time in the past couple of days I could have read it in a matter of hours. The book is written like a suspense novel, and there is lots of material for the reader to wonder about: How Clay fits into the tapes chief among them.

3- All in all, I found this to be an important book about the way that high schoolers, or people in general treat each other.  It certainly makes you think twice about the way that you interact with others. I don’t need to read it again, but I did find it an engrossing and worthwhile read.

Next up: The Tiger’s Wife, which is getting a lot of press for its author, who is ironically the same age as me, yet has already been named on the New Yorker’s 20 authors under 40 to watch.