When routine bites hard,
And ambitions are low,
And resentment rides high,
But emotions won't grow,
And we're changing our ways,
Taking different roads.
Then love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.
-- Joy Divison, "Love Will Tear Us Apart"
It's 1986. Eleanor--chubby, dressed outrageously, with unruly, curly, bright red hair--has just transferred to a new high school in Omaha. Out of necessity, she sits next to Park on the school bus. Park is half-Korean, trying hard not to be an outsider at school but drowning out the world with Skinny Puppy, Joy Division and the Cure. At first, Park feels sorry for Eleanor, who clearly doesn't know how to fit in and be anonymous. But their bus rides to and from school soon grow into an awkward friendship, bonding over X-Men comics and trading mix tapes of the Smiths and the Beatles. And from that friendship grows a love that is passionate, desperate, insecure and intense. Park's relatively stable, middle class family becomes a refuge for Eleanor, trapped in poverty and an abusive home. But complications, both internal and external, constantly test their relationship.
Eleanor & Park is a wonderful, beautiful, tense novel. Like the main characters, I was 16 in 1986, and even though it was more than 25 years ago, I can still remember the strong, confusing, mercurial emotions and passions I had then. Author Rainbow Rowell captures that perfectly. She shifts the point of view back and forth between Eleanor and Park, showing their jumbled minds and hearts, their teenage feelings of being both powerful and powerless. She captures that rush of emotions, the fear and bravado, the love and disgust, the adoration and self-loathing so very, very well, with a style that's both casually snarky and gorgeously poetic, with dialogue that absolutely rings true. Eleanor & Park, like the inner lives of teenagers, is both epic and gritty, romantic and grim, tangled and straightforward. There are no easy answers in Eleanor & Park. But in the end, there is...hope.
You shut your mouth,
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved,
just like everybody else does.
-- The Smiths, "How Soon Is Now?"