Eleanor & Park: Summary and book reviews of Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, plus links to an excerpt from Eleanor & Park and a biography of Rainbow Rowell.
Eleanor & Park
by Rainbow Rowell
Hardcover: Feb 2013,
320 pages.
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.
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. (Reviewed by Tamara Smith).
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Funny, hopeful, foulmouthed, sexy and tear-jerking, this winning romance will captivate teen and adult readers alike.
VOYA
This is a stunning debut from a promising new author.
Booklist
Starred Review. The pure, fear-laced, yet steadily maturing relationship Eleanor and Park develop is urgent and breathtaking and, of course, heartbreaking, too.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Rowell keeps things surprising, and the solution - imperfect but believable - maintains the novel's delicate balance of light and dark.
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 was loud and dissonant, lyrics were often shouted instead of sung, and the message was often political and anti-establishment. One or two electric guitars, electric bass and a drum kit, plus vocals, usually made up a punk rock band. Songs were often short – under 2 minutes long – lyrics were blunt and provocative, and...
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The catastrophic wildfires that struck Southern California in 2007 act as the backdrop for this compelling story full of peril, desperation, and love.
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