Eleanor & Park
Rainbow Rowell, 2013
Young adult RomanceHistoryGraphic novels & humour
Two misfit teenagers on the same school bus in 1986 fall for each other over comics and mix tapes, while home life makes ordinary survival feel radical. A tender, witty slow burn told in alternating voices, with the ache of first love and the weight of difficult home lives close behind.
Feels like tenderness and nostalgia. About freedom and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy awkward, music-filled teen romance and characters who feel like outsiders. Some home scenes include domestic cruelty and bullying, and the 1986 references and slow bus-ride buildup ask for patience.
Why read it
It gives you two distinct voices, a 1986 setting full of comics and tapes, and a romance that takes ordinary teenage survival seriously.
A page from the book
The private freedom music promises once a teenager can finally drive.
He could get back to New Wave in November, after he got his driver’s license. His parents had already said Park could have his mom’s Impala, and he’d been saving up for a new tape deck. Once he started driving to school, he could listen to whatever he wanted or nothing at all, and he’d get to sleep in an extra twenty minutes. Rainbow Rowell.Rainbow Rowell was a newspaper columnist and copy editor at the Omaha World-Herald, in the Nebraska city where this novel is set.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Eleanor & Park for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy awkward, music-filled teen romance and characters who feel like outsiders. Some home scenes include domestic cruelty and bullying, and the 1986 references and slow bus-ride buildup ask for patience.
- What is Eleanor & Park like?
- A tender, witty slow burn told in alternating voices, with the ache of first love and the weight of difficult home lives close behind. Feels like tenderness and nostalgia. About freedom and identity.
- What should I read after Eleanor & Park?
- If you liked Eleanor & Park, try Heartstopper (Alice Oseman), The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (Gabrielle Zevin) and Wonder (R.J. Palacio).
A taste of the feed
What you cannot know by looking, and what it costs to guess.
You can’t tell whether people are gay by what they look like. And gay or straight aren’t the only two options. Anyway, it’s very rude to speculate about people’s sexuality.
Heartstopper · Alice Oseman
How to say your life is in books without saying it.
The words you can’t find, you borrow. We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry · Gabrielle Zevin
The wish is not to be beautiful, only to be unnoticed.
If I found a magic lamp and I could have one wish, I would wish that I had a normal face that no one ever noticed at all. I would wish that I could walk down the street without people seeing me and then doing that look-away thing. Here’s what I think: the only reason I’m not ordinary is that no one else sees me that way.
Wonder · R.J. Palacio
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