Friday, December 24, 2010

A Review of 'Th1rteen R3asons Why' by Jay Asher

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, he reasons. 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.”

This was difficult to read. It’s not that it was badly written, no, in fact, that’s the opposite of what this book is. I mean that it was dense; there is a lot to take in.

I haven’t read too many books that involve suicide, but out of the ones that I have read, this one is different in a few ways.

  1. It’s completely about suicide. Of the books that I’ve read, they mostly involve the suicide of a minor character or to a major character who (thank goodness) gets help. This book is everything that leads up to Hannah’s untimely death.
  1. The other books didn’t involve audio tapes with a last message.
  1. This book involved actual reasons whereas in other books, the families and friends are left to wonder why.

As soon as I started reading and the first lines on side A of the first tape were said, my heart started thudding because I was genuinely worried for Clay.

The painful part about reading this is you know how all of this ends, even though you might not know how everything got to that last point right away.

By reading this book, I have realized how much I can affect another person just by doing or saying something that seems really harmless. It has really made me step back to think before I speak.

This was a very well-written, sad, and eye-opening book. For that, I give ‘Th1rteen R3asons Why’:

Thanks for reading!

--Jude

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