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I put off reading this book for a very, very long time. There I said it. I didn't really care to try to read it until I wanted to do a blog post (which will hopefully be up soon) about topics such as this. While searching books which were on the topics, Thirteen Reasons Why kept popping up with the different list of novels.
To understand this books, you must understand the characters, which are a lot and little at the same time.
Clay Jensen is the main character of Thirteen Reasons Why. He's a pretty average guy: good grades, has many acquaintances, and is nice to almost everyone. The book first opens up with clay sending the set of tapes that Hannah made onto the next person. I would call this something like a prologue (because it tells of a future event without the story opening up.) Then in the real chapter one, Clay receives the set of tapes in the mail. Like any teenager, he's super excited that he got a package addressed to him and not his parents. It's a set a tapes, and he's thinking, "Who even uses tapes anymore?" However, as he starts to listen to the first tape, he realizes that this is Hannah's, his classmate's, voice, and she's telling him to listen to all thirteen tapes and send it to the next name after his or a second set of tapes will be set out. So, Clay listens to Hannah's tapes as he travels from destination to destination marked on the map, learning Hannah's deepest thoughts.
Hannah Baker is not average. She looks average on the outside, but she's far from it. See, Hannah's dead. She committed suicide not long ago, and had made thirteen tapes addressed to individuals who contributed to her decision into taking her life. Which is really messed up if you think about it because who would want to know that they were to blame in taking a young girl's life? She mapped out each event on a map, gave a separate set of tapes to Clay's friend, and told the unlucky thirteen individual's why she decided to take her life. This book may seem like it's about Clay, but it's all about Hannah, and what Hannah thinks and feels. Honestly, Clay was just the unlucky guy who had to listen to the tapes.
It's a dark novel, I'll admit this, but it doesn't feel very dark. Of course there is Clay's emotions and thoughts that are being told alongside Hannah's narrative, but I was way more concerned on the stories that Hannah was telling than the fact that she was dead.
I'm a sucker for novels like these. You know the kind that make you think about what you just read? The kind you can apply to in your daily life? We have all been Hannah Baker. We have all been in High School, and felt the weight from our peers gossip. We have all felt helpless, like we have no control over what people say about us. We have all hated something that we've done.
But not all of us have fell so deep that we didn't get to come back up. This book maps out what it's like to want to die, what it's like to have rumor upon rumor spread about you, and what it's like to feel like you can't trust anyone so gracefully that the reader just feels what Hannah is saying. Because we have all been there.
I feel like this would be a great novel for any High School-- heck, even a Middle School student, to read. No, this isn't to promote suicide, or to send tapes of you speaking about who has wronged you. It's to tell you that everyone has been there, and that one action you make can be a major part in the snowball effect. I think learning about actions would be very valuable to young people today.
P.S. Netflix has taken on the project of making Thirteen Reasons Why into a mini-series. It should be out this year, though the date isn't released. I'm so excited!
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