Title: Thirteen Reasons Why Author: Jay Asher # of Pages: 288 (paperback) Genre: YA, Contemporary, Mystery Rating: ★★★☆☆ Synopsis:You can't stop the future. You can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret. . . is to press play.
Clay Jensen doesn't want anything to do with the tapes Hannah Baker made. Hannah is dead. Her secrets should be buried with her.
Then Hannah's voice tells Clay that his name is on her tapes-- and that he is, in some way, responsible for her death.
All through the night, Clay keeps listening. He follows Hannah's recorded words throughout his small town. . .
. . .and what he discovers changes his life forever. Review: To be honest, I'm a little scared to write this review.
Thirteen Reasons Why is a page-turner (I practically read it in a day!) that addresses a very controversial topic: suicide. What made me want to continue reading it throughout the day was not because of how it made me feel (which was a combination of anger and sadness), but because of the mystery behind the tapes Hannah made.
Why was I so angry while reading this book? It's because of Hannah. SHE made the decision to kill herself, yet she blamed it on other people. Sure, there are people who are jerks and make the world seem like a terrible place sometimes, but we have the power to choose how they are going to effect our lives.
But some of the people on her list weren't complete jerks. Everyone makes mistakes or accidentally say/do things they don't mean. While these people's actions may have hurt Hannah, does that give her the right to record these tapes as "revenge"? You would have thought that she wouldn't want people to experience the same pain that she felt near the end of her life, especially Clay. Wouldn't she hope that no one would have to experience what she has? But she forces the people on the list to do just that, people who were probably unaware they were contributing to the snowball effect.
In a way, this book is sending the exact message Asher wanted it to send, "It's important to be aware of how we treat others" (Asher, Between the Lines: Thirteen Questions for Jay Asher). But while this statement is true, it does not justify Hannah's death, nor does it make the people on the list guilty of her passing. And if the people on the list are at fault, then so is Hannah. Her own mind and the decisions that were made within it resulted in how she coped with the challenging situations she encountered.
Do not expect this to be a happy read. If you think this book will help you somehow, then go ahead and read it. But if you want to read it for fun...be wary.
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