Review: Eleanor & Park

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Warning: review slightly spoilery

So torn between four and five stars. On the one hand, I thought four throughout the book, but then the ending... I thought it was really, really good. You knew they'd split up somehow (it's barely a spoiler, it's literally on page one), but not how. And what happened... yeah, it was not what I expected, but I enjoyed it. With 40 pages left, I was like "what on earth is gonna break these two apart!?", and then, BOOM, there it was.

And the big reveal was sort of obvious looking back, but I still didn't see it coming. MOstly because, as Eleanor says, she pretended not to know. So you had to read between the lines and I guess I didn't want too. Until it was impossible not to see it.

So, this book was quite different from what I thought it was going to be: for some reason I thought the characters were gonna be older. I had heard about Eleanor having two black best friends, on the trope page for sassy black friend. And they were so that stereotype, throughout the book I could never tell them apart. That would probably be my main critic of the book: they should have been better developed characters.

As for those threee words ... I don't think they were "I love you". I'd guess "Nothing ever ends", or anything hinting that they'd see each other again sometime. And it would be a good way of telling Park she was happy and doing well: that she had the opportunity to read comics still. So that's my guess, at least.

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True story.