Reading ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell

I started this book as an audiobook in the car a few weeks ago.  It started slow, and it felt like a typical high-school romance at first.  At some point it morphed into something else.  It's a little more than just a high-school love story.

I should say a few things about this book before I try to write through this inarticulate confusion.

• The book is YA Realistic.  There's some language, and some PG-13 stuff.  It's not too graphic, in my opinion.  But it's not MG.
• It takes place in the 80's, with lots of comments about bands, TV shows, and 80's culture - like big hair, bangs, and the walkman.  
• It's mostly friendly to teachers.  It's not a book about how awesome teachers are.  It's also not a book about how evil they are.  There are some cool teachers, and some semi-cool teachers, but no horrible, nasty kid-torturers.  

All of this adds up to a reasonable claim that maybe the book might be YA that was written for teachers?  I'm not sure that's entirely fair.  It's a good book, and I think kids would like it.  There are several brilliant passages, and I think most kids can feel that when they read it.  But it still feels like this book would be really special for older readers, and only pretty good for younger ones.  I don't know - I might be wrong about this.  

So, what am I trying to say about this book?

I didn't really like the ending.  I don't want to spoil it, but it wasn't enough.  It didn't feel like the story was really over when it ended.  

I should also say that the audiobook was a little disappointing.  I enjoyed the audio, but when I wanted to finish the last part of the book, and I finally had access to a paper copy, I found that the printed version of the book was much better than the audio.  Rowell's written voice was much richer and fit my imagination much better than the two voices from the audio.  

The back-and-forth first-person narration of the book works well when your brain is imagining the voices, I think.  I think we can conjure an appropriate-sounding voice for Eleanor, for instance.  Then, when Park is narrating what Eleanor is saying, we can use the correct voice, not the Park narrator trying to sound like Eleanor.  

Maybe that was the problem.  The audio, with two narrators, made the characters feel inconsistent.  When the actor reading Park did his voice for Park's father, for instance, it sounded very different from when the actress playing Eleanor tried to do it.  (And when Eleanor tried to explain what Park was saying, it sounded fake, and vice versa.)

Perhaps I should re-read this, in print.  

So, what did I mean when I said this was "more than a high-school love story"?  I think the back-and-forth voices were a cool technique.  I think it made the two perspectives more distinct and the narrative richer.  I also liked that the characters weren't typical "diamond in the rough" kids - they weren't just popular kids in need of a makeover.  Park is half-Korean, and Eleanor is a "big girl."  

I also really like Park's parents.  They both make terrible, even cruel mistakes with their kids.  But then they both end up surprisingly trusting, open, and reasonable.  They aren't too good to be true - because both of them have their jerk moments - but both of them more than make up for these things. In some ways, I like Park's father more than Park.  

(This feels like a bad rough draft of a review.  I'm going to publish this anyway, as a lesson to myself and my students.  Hope you enjoyed my unfocused, disorganized, and off-topic meanderings.)

Why read fantasy fiction?

I know that not everyone likes to read fantasy, and I understand a lot of the stereotypes.  I've heard more than my share of jokes about Frodo and hobbits.  But I think that the purpose of fantasy fiction (at least for me) goes a lot deeper - or perhaps wider - than just escapism.

When I was younger, I wasn't a big reader of fantasy.  I read a lot of science fiction and "classics."  Later, when I became a graduate student in English, reading became work, and I only read books that were related to my research interests or assigned.  What changed my reading habits?  Harry Potter.

I've talked about and written about Harry before, and I'm sure that we've all developed our own relationships with the Boy Who Lived.  For me, it was a little display at Borders (ouch!) with the three books that were out at the time.  There was a sign that made me think these books were popular.  I decided to check out the first book.  I read the whole thing in a day.  It was easy to read, short (at least the first book was), and fun.  I ended up reading the entire series, re-reading all of the books every time another installment came out, and even standing in line at Borders (again!) the night the final book came out.

Since then, I've become a middle school literacy teacher, so reading YA fantasy can be considered "work" again, but it's much more fun work than trying to wade through yet another book about William Faulkner (which was my unfinished dissertation topic).  I've also become something of a specialist in YA fantasy and science fiction.  It seems like these two subgenres are my "comfort zone." Much of what I read for fun falls into either of these categories.  Here's a partial list of fantasy books/series that I've read:

Harry Potter (of course)
Lightning Thief
Lord of the Rings
Fablehaven
Books of Pellinor
Resurrection of Magic
Inheritance
Keys to the Kingdom
Abhorsen
Curse Workers
Demon's Lexicon
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Amulet
Chronicles of Ancient Darkness
Faerie Wars
Gone
Wake
Bartimaeus
Alchemyst
Earthsea
Boneshaker
His Dark Materials
Narnia
Tuck Everlasting
Replacement
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Raven Boys
Girl of Fire and Thorns
Chronicles of Prydain
Powerless
Sea of Trolls
Sandman
Peter and the Starcatchers
False Prince
Shadow and Bone
Chime
Marbury Lens
Finnikin of the Rock
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer
Dragon Slippers
Jinx
Magic Thief
Lord Loss
Last Apprentice
Warrior Heir
Chronicles of Prydain
Redwall
Glass Houses
Uglies
Fallen
Summoning
Evermore
Graceling
Artemis Fowl
Marked
Forest of Hands and Teeth
Eighth Grade Bites
Vampire Diaries
Merchant of Death
Midnight for Charlie Bone
If I Stay
Before I Fall
Shiver
Ranger's Apprentice
Gifts
Mortal Instruments
Elsewhere
Madapple
Great and Terrible Beauty
Tithe
Twilight
Iron King
Bone
Graveyard Book
Beyonders
Red Pyramid
Lost Hero
Septimus Heap

I didn't include any science fiction (except where it wasn't clearly only science fiction or fantasy.  For example, Artemis Fowl is kind of a mix of science fiction and fantasy).  I also didn't include any grown-up fantasy (like the Dresden files or Terry Pratchet's Discworld books).

So, what's so great about "fantasy" that doesn't apply to other kinds of YA fiction?

1. Fantasy tends to be weirder, with stranger characters and unusual situations.  For example, the Curse Workers series by Holly Black takes place in a universe with a section of the population that can do magic with their hands.  One of the main characters' relatives, for example, can kill people just by touching them.  As a result, everyone wears gloves, and it's considered indecent to show people your naked hands.  Isn't that weird?  
2. Fantasy tends to be much longer, often stretched over several books, giving a much fuller sense of fictional reality, character, and story development.  Harry Potter's books span seven years, and the Harry who fights Voldemort in the seventh book is very different from the little kid who sleeps under the stairs at the Dursley's.  Sometimes this can be a fault. (I'm thinking of books that just ramble on and on, as if trying to fill pages, or that end strangely, to encourage readers to pick up the sequels.)
3. Fantasy isn't afraid to be epic, to have delusions of grandeur, and to talk about the struggle between good and evil or the end of the world.  It doesn't have to be - and this is perhaps the most often lampooned characteristic of the subgenre - but it often is.  This is probably my favorite thing about fantasy.  There are usually "bad guys," and they are usually really bad.  Voldemort is a sociopath who kills and tortures because he enjoys it.  Increasingly, there are more ambiguously good heroes.  Curse Workers is a nice example - Cassel Sharpe, the main character, is connected to a powerful crime family, and commits several crimes throughout the books.  Sage/Jaron, the main character in The False Prince/Runaway King, is a thief.  

I think a lot of these things are also true of science fiction.  I also think that some of the lines between the two subgenres are blurring.  Interworld is a good example of this - it's about the struggle between a magic-based society and a science-based society, and maintaining a balance between the two.  

I would never say that fantasy is the only kind of "good book" out there.  I've read a lot of other books that were awesome.  And there are a lot of "grown-up" fantasies that are fantastic and popular.  I know we've all heard of Game of Thrones, but The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a really good fantasy that hasn't yet become a movie or HBO series (though it would make a great film).  And we all also know that turning something into a movie doesn't mean that the book was awesome (Twilight comes to mind) or that the movie/series will be great (Dresden Files comes to mind).  

Anyway, I've been planning a top ten list for some time.  I'll be working on that next.