BOOK REVIEW '13 Reasons Why'

13 Reasons Why

By: Jay Asher

I'm not normally very emotionally shaken. Never cried in a movie, and only wept in 2 books in my life, but this book, this book was something completley different. It wasn't really the crying kind of sad, more the taken aback kind of shocking sad that you think you are prepared for, but truly are the furthest thing from. I, at one point, actually set the book down and walked away from it for a minute to catch my breath. 

This novel's entire plot examines what can be a very sensitive topic for some people, teen suicide. From the point when the book begins, Hannah Baker commited suicide a few weeks earlier. Clay Jensen is just staring to get back to normalcy and getting Hannah out of his mind when on his porch one day is a package. This isn't just any normal package holding movies you bought off Amazon, it contains Hannah Baiker's suicide note. There are 7 tapes, between them holding the 13 sides to her story, and the people that unknowingly helped her make that life-ending decision. And, if you recieve those tapes, you are one of those people. 

In a 12 hour journey into the mind of a suicidal girl, Clay fights through feeling and memories of Hannah he already tried so hard to repress, and I felt every one of them with him the entire time. The novel is beautiful and life changing. I cannot say enough nice things about it. The fact that I got so caught up in it that I had to walk away from it never fails to amaze me because I have never had anything like that happen me before, in a novel or real life. That is just the astonishing power and tremendous real life feel in this novel. 

It is about so much more then just a suicide though. You can pick out themes of going after what you want and not getting too caught up in the past easily. There's an even greater theme than that though. It is about how the little moves you make every day, in somehow, some way cause something else to happen. Most of Hannah's reasons had to do with the stupid way's people acted to her that just lowered her self worth to the point where she couldn't take it anymore. 

For those out there who are extremely daring, you can also have the tapes read to you by a Hannah Baker-like voice and other extras that go along with the novel off the book's webiste  http://www.thirteenreasonswhy.com/

And anyone that is as affected by this book as me, there is the 13 Reasons Why project where you can share your story with this novel and your thoughts on it novel and it's topics http://13rwproject.com/#/reviews/114

Pages: 288 

Read In: I don't remember at all

Rating: 9/10

Ages: 13- up