The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult novel told through letters by Stephen Chbosky. I bought this book for book club and ended up tearing through it in one day. It’s an intense read. The author takes the events in the book and spins them on their head a few times and it’s… intense.
The Good: This book was very well written, very very very engaging, and all kinds of literary fun. The twists were unbelievable. This is definitely a book to reread because you’ll get a whole different story the second time through
The bad: The character felt too young to be in high school. In retrospect that makes sense, but in the context of the book, other characters react to him or situations like he’s in seventh grade. There’s lots of “Do you understand what just happened?” and OMG, a senior is going out with a freshmen, the perv. When I was in high school, and now, teaching high school, there wasn’t much in the way of an acknowledged age difference between seniors and freshmen. There is from an adults perspective, but not from the kids themselves. It just kept throwing me, but by the end of the book that attitude was mostly gone.
The spoilers: WARNING…. SPOILERS

I couldn’t get over the suicide note/poem. It was so sad that his friend showed him this poem, and Charlie latched onto it without understanding it was a cry for help. It really added another layer to everything about Michael. I kind of liked that Charlie still never seemed to get that the poem was Michael’s suicide note. It made all his thoughts that much more tragic.

The thing with the Aunt just put this whole new spin on the entire book. I’m really curious how all of this is going to translate to film.