The Cephalopod Coffeehouse - Eleanor & Park

Welcome to another edition of the Cephalopod Coffeehouse. The idea is simple: on the last Friday of each month, post about the best book you've finished over the past month while visiting other bloggers doing the same.  In this way, we'll all have the opportunity to share our thoughts with other enthusiastic readers.  Please join us:

This month I'm going to tell you about Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. I was convinced to buy it after reading an article from the Bent Agency (which I would link to if I wasn't such an idiot and deleted the message AND emptied my trash.) which talked about characters and how to deepen them, give the reader more. Eleanor & Park was given as an example and this prompted me to click buy.

Bono met his wife in high school, Park says.
So did Jerry Lee Lewis, Eleanor answers.
I’m not kidding, he says.
You should be, she says, we’re 16.
What about Romeo and Juliet?
Shallow, confused, then dead.
I love you, Park says.
Wherefore art thou, Eleanor answers.
I’m not kidding, he says.
You should be.
Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.


I loved this book. I loved Eleanor (who happens to have my favorite name) and Park, both of whom embody all the awkwardness of being a teenager combined with being different. Eleanor might be white, but she's poor white trash (and I mean poor, like she has to hold her bra together with a safety pin), overweight, with bright red completely unmanageable hair. Park is Asian (Korean actually - and I totally would've fallen in love with him, too) and perhaps the only person of color in their homogenous high school. Somehow they fall in love. And that's all I'm going to say except that I adored them both. Also, Park's parents were totally awesome.