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Book Reviewed by:Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits - smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember your own first love - and just how hard it pulled you under.
*Since its publication, Eleanor & Park has been criticized for its stereotypical, racist and harmful portrayal of Korean Americans. The decision to move ahead with a film adaptation of the book despite this issue has met with additional criticism.
Winner of the BookBrowse 2013 Best Young Adult Book Award
Bono met his wife in high school, Park says.
So did Jerry Lee Lewis, Eleanor answers.
I'm not kidding, he says.
You should be, she says, we're 16.
What about Romeo and Juliet? Shallow, confused, then dead.
I love you, Park says.
Wherefore art thou, Eleanor answers.
I'm not kidding, he says.
You should be.
Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits - smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember your own first love - and just how hard it pulled you under.
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BookBrowse Awards
2013
Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards
2014
In the end, I had a deep sense of who Eleanor and Park were – as individual notes and as a song. A punk rock song. A little dissonant, a little loud, but a song I wanted to sing along with, one of those songs that gets under my skin and matches the beat of my own heart...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Tamara Ellis Smith).
In my review of Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park, I suggest that if the novel were a song, it would be a punk rock song. I hold firm to that idea.
A brief (if incomplete) lesson on punk rock music: First, as is true with the birth of most genres of anything (music, art, architecture, etc.), pinpointing the beginning is tough, if not impossible. But most people believe that punk rock started in the '60s. A response to the flower-power hippie movement of the same era, it was nihilistic, loud and mad. The bands were made up of garage musicians – musicians who had little or no training and who didn't know the "rules" of music, so they broke them. A strong DIY philosophy was a cornerstone of the movement. Performances were raw. The music ...
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