Eleanor & Park

By Rainbow Rowell

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Love can be an amazing yet tragic experience to endure on one’s heart, and Rainbow Rowell depicts this very well in her novel Eleanor & Park. This book takes place in Omaha, Nebraska, in the year 1986, and it is a love story with major obstacles for the two main characters, Eleanor and Park. This is one of my favorite romances because it shows that love is not always an easy task to take on and it also shows that it takes a lot of effort and energy to make a relationship work.

To start off with, Park Sheridan is a skinny sixteen year old Asian boy who listens to punk music, wears mostly black T-shirts and does not have any super close friends. He does fit in with the popular crowd, but none of them are true friends. Every morning he takes the bus to school, and he sits by himself with a comic book and headphones on until he gets there.

Next comes Eleanor Douglas. She is a plumpish sixteen year old girl with wild red curls who is kicked out of her house by her step-dad for a year and is just getting to come back to live with him, her mom and her four siblings in a house so small that all five children living there share one bedroom.

It was just a normal day on the bus for Park until Eleanor got on in the morning and had no idea where to sit. She looked confused yet calm, and Park finally decided to let her sit down next to him because he wanted the bus to continue on its daily route. That was how the love story began.

Ever since that day, Park let Eleanor sit with him. At first, they did not talk at all. They began to converse a little until all these feelings were bubbling up inside both of them so much they fell for each other. The way their relationship progressed throughout the story was grand. Rowell had so many feelings incorporated in her writing, and the details of both of the characters’ emotions were remarkable. For example, when I read this novel, I could feel the “butterflies” that Eleanor got in her stomach when she saw Park. Rowell’s way of writing made the words come off the page and into one’s heart, making one feel the pain and the affection these two teenagers have toward each other.

What I liked most about this book was the way Rowell wrote it. She wrote the book in third person and changed the perspective from Eleanor and Park frequently. I liked this because I saw how Eleanor was feeling about a situation versus how Park was feeling about the same situation. Also, I liked how Rowell showed the difference in their lives at home when the other one was not around. Eleanor’s life at home was very difficult while Park’s life was not. Park was Eleanor’s escape, and I loved how Rowell showed that through the different perspectives throughout her book.

I gave this book 5 out of 5 stars because it is one of the best romance novels I have read. It shows the passion and agony in the characters, and it is not one’s typical cheesy, romance novel where the two main characters fall in love and live happily ever after. This novel is much more dense than that. It shows much more emotion, and shows how life is unpredictable.