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kareilaI knew nothing about this book going in except that it had been made into a movie with Emma Watson, and that John Green liked it. I read the whole thing in about four hours this evening.
The story takes place over the course of the 1991-1992 school year, when the protagonist, Charlie, is a freshman in high school and his two best friends are seniors. I was a junior that year, and also tended to have close friends in other grades, so I identified with that aspect of the story. Charlie's process of finding himself was also very familiar, the way he observes people and deeply cares about them, but is clueless about the socially acceptable thing to do in any given situation.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of drug use and teenage sex, which put me off. Charlie's excitement to receive a typewriter seemed unrealistic for that era, and no one in the story ever seems to have heard of a computer. But in other respects (books, music, TV) it wasn't too far off from what I remember at that time. I liked the characters, and Charlie is the sort of person I would have been friends with.
The story takes place over the course of the 1991-1992 school year, when the protagonist, Charlie, is a freshman in high school and his two best friends are seniors. I was a junior that year, and also tended to have close friends in other grades, so I identified with that aspect of the story. Charlie's process of finding himself was also very familiar, the way he observes people and deeply cares about them, but is clueless about the socially acceptable thing to do in any given situation.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of drug use and teenage sex, which put me off. Charlie's excitement to receive a typewriter seemed unrealistic for that era, and no one in the story ever seems to have heard of a computer. But in other respects (books, music, TV) it wasn't too far off from what I remember at that time. I liked the characters, and Charlie is the sort of person I would have been friends with.
