Eleanor & Park
By Rainbow Rowell
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
To Sum It Up:
In 1986 Omaha, Nebraska, Eleanor Douglas has just returned to living with her family. Her home life is still miserable because of her abusive stepfather, and, as the new girl at school, Eleanor is almost instantly subjected to ridicule. Park Sheridan begrudgingly offers her the seat next to him on the school bus, a moment that proves to be significant for both of them. Soon Eleanor is secretly reading Park’s comic books over his shoulder; this then leads the two to talking about comics and music, conversations that become essential parts of their daily lives.
Review:
I feel like this review needs some kind of disclaimer (yep, it’s going to be
that kind of review), so here goes. This is the toughest review I’ve had to write so far. It’s going to be rambling, for which I apologize in advance; I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts for over a week, and it’s just not happening. Normally when I finish a book, I have a rough idea of the points I want to cover in the review, but with
Eleanor & Park, I don’t know where to start.
Before I attempt to articulate why this book didn’t work for me, I also feel the need to disclose that realistic fiction is the genre that I read the least often. I usually read for escapism, and though realistic fiction is still fiction, most of the time I prefer to read about a world that’s far removed from this one. So why do I still bother with the genre, then? I have had the occasional success with it, and I worry that cutting it off completely would mean missing out on some great books. It’s just a matter of finding the ones that are right for me. Sadly, Eleanor & Park was not one of them.
I first became interested in the book after it seemed like everyone was reading it, and if you look at the reviews, a slew of them are five star. I took a particular interest in this book when I found out that Park was half-Korean, the son of a Korean mother and a Caucasian father. While our situations aren’t quite the same (I was born in Seoul and adopted when I was four months old; my mom was of Irish descent, my dad of Irish and German descent), I was still very curious to read about Park’s experiences growing up in an interracial family. I don’t know if I went into the book with subconscious expectations of how Park’s heritage would be explored, but to me, it was a subject that wasn’t probed nearly deeply enough. In fact, the portrayal of his whole family was one of the stumbling blocks that I encountered while reading this.
Park senses a distance between him and his father, and he wonders if it’s because he inherited more of his features from his mother than his brother, Josh, did. Now, Park also says that his parents are madly in love with each other. If Park’s dad is madly in love with his Korean wife, why would it matter if his son takes after her in appearance? I’m missing something here. There’s also zero backstory about how Park’s parents met other than that his father was in the military and stationed in Korea, and Park’s mother conveniently doesn’t talk about her life there. It’s as if she had no life until she married Park’s dad, came to America, had two kids, and started doing hair and nails out of her garage. I found this image one-dimensional and unsettling.
As a character, Park didn’t strike me as one of substance. Aside from his occasional identity issues, there wasn’t much else to him. He alternates between pondering his looks and mooning over Eleanor. I did want to scream at him when he asked Eleanor, this girl whom he’s supposed to be absolutely, completely in love with, if she was the one scrawling lewd graffiti on her own textbooks. What?! When she suggests that it might be Tina, one of the girls at school who’s been bullying her, Park sticks up for Tina. He was so clueless at times about how hellish Eleanor’s life was, especially at home.
I wasn’t fond of Eleanor, either. Personality-wise, she wasn’t the type of character I could connect with, but I also really didn’t like the way she saw Park sometimes—as Asian first, as Park second. Before she knew his name, he was “that Asian kid.” Even after these two are supposed to be madly in love with each other (which I didn’t buy, and the romance in general was too sappy for my liking), she still makes the offhand remark about his appearance, not in a mocking way, but it’s like this is the first thing she notices about him. If this was meant to reinforce how lacking in ethnic diversity Eleanor and Park’s neighborhood was, I don’t think this was necessarily the best way to go about doing so. There was a lot of potential here to examine why Eleanor thinks and says some of the things she does, but there’s hardly any follow-through.
I get all nostalgic over the 80’s, and the geek in me appreciated the X-Men and Star Wars references. And I was ecstatic to see Elvis Costello and “Alison” name checked. All of this was not, however, sufficient to overcome the issues I had with the book, which also asked me to believe that these two characters were the 1986 equivalent of Romeo and Juliet. I’ve never considered the latter couple to be the paragon of adolescent love, so perhaps that was another reason why I had trouble with Eleanor & Park. Of course, there are many readers who loved this book, and I encourage you not to let my sole experience with it dissuade you from checking it out.
All in All:
If ever there was a book that I’d describe as a “try it for yourself and see how like it” read, it’s this one. To me, liking a book is always a matter of personal preference, and in this instance, the book and I ended up being wholly mismatched.
