TITLE: The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
AUTHOR: Stephen Chbosky
GENRE: Fiction, Epistolary
PUBLISHED: 1999
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon, Kobo.
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review:
DESCRIPTION:This is the story of Charlie a freshman. And while he's not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. He's a wallflower--shy and introspective, and intelligent beyond his years, if not very savvy in the social arts. We learn about Charlie through the letters he writes to someone of undisclosed name, age, and gender, a technique that endears him to readers. Charlie encounters the same struggles that many kids face in high school--how to make friends, the intensity of a crush, family tensions, a first relationship, exploring sexuality, experimenting with drugs--but he must also deal with his best friend's recent suicide.
REVIEW:
“Standing on the fringes of life... offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.”
This is the line in the introduction that forced me to pick up this book because, frankly, after reading the introduction, I felt I could see where Charlie is coming from, I just had to read the book and let me tell you, it is a Brilliant Read.
Fifteen-year-old Charlie is coping with the suicide of his friend, Michael. To lessen the fear and anxiety of starting high school alone, Charlie starts writing letters to a stranger, someone he heard was nice but has never met in person.
“I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist.”
Charlie's letters take on the intimate feel of a journal as he shares his day-to-day thoughts and feelings.
At school, Charlie finds a friend and mentor in his English teacher, Bill. He also overcomes his chronic shyness and approaches a classmate, Patrick, who, along with his step-sister Sam, becomes two of Charlie's best friends. During the year, he experiences various firsts: first date, first kiss, first experience with drugs and drinking and masturbation. He deals with bullies and learns about relationships. He creates his own soundtrack through a series of mix tapes full of iconic songs, reads a huge stack of classic books(like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Peter Pan, The Great Gatsby, On the Road), and gets involved in the Rocky Horror Picture Show audience-participation culture. His transformation or development is profoundly affected by reading, his passion.
She was the first girl I ever wanted to ask on a date someday when I can drive.
Sam has brown hair and very very pretty green eyes. The kind of green that doesn’t make a big deal about itself.
Such innocence! Charlie idolizes Sam but has a crush on her but feels too shy to admit. He is mortified when he has a wet dream about her, thinking it is very inappropriate. He confesses to her and she tells him nothing can ever happen between them but the dream was normal. First rejection, heartache. Even though Charlie gets a girlfriend later on, he is not over Sam. When they kiss later in the book, he is over the moon.
It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life.
Truly a moment for the old romantics!
Patrick, Sam’s gay brother tries to kiss Charlie, he is confused. He likes Patrick’s company, but does he like him “that way”? This confusion is typical of adolescents and it is indeed a touching moment Patrick apologises for his drunken misbehaviour and Charlie acknowledges that it could never have happened.
Charlie has a relatively stable home life, though, with supportive, if distant, parents to fall back on. Unfortunately, a disturbing family secret that Charlie has repressed for his entire life surfaces at the end of the school year. **Spoiler**: He was sexually assaulted by his aunt Helen. **Spoiler** Charlie has a severe mental breakdown and ends up hospitalized.
I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they're here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It's like looking at all the students and wondering who's had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why.
What I really loved about the book was the detail. It is not something I generally like as it is done in excess, but I loved learning about Charlie’s views about everything, school, people around him, situations. As Charlie says,
Sometimes, I read a book, and I think am the people in the book.
it felt great that I, a reader, could remember feeling like it, I could empathize.
One thing I didn’t like though was the incessant crying. Charlie cries at almost anything! Seriously, too much for a fifteen year old I think.
So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.
A fantastic quote. It tells us how far the character has come, and certainly stirred something in me. Be who ‘best’ you can be. Charlie's final letter closes with feelings of hope: getting released from the hospital, forgiving his aunt Helen for what she did to him, finding new friends during sophomore year as Sam and Patrick are leaving, and trying his best not to be a wallflower. Charlie hopes to get out of his head and into the real world, participating in life instead of just watching it fly by.
This book contains a number of amazing quotes which I could not include here. You can find them here, if interested: Quotes
Last edited by jackdawson on Oct 1st, 2012, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Seems like there is more to the story