Eleanor & Park

DNF: It took me two months to get about 65% through it...
Just not enough happened in this book for me to stay interested. This book has made me realize that contemporary books are not my cup of tea.
I will either give this book to my step sister/cousin or sell it to Half-Priced Books.

I don't know how to write about this book. Eleanor and Park. Eleanor and Park. A "must read" falls short of the world's greatest understatement.

This novel. These teens. They make you split yourself open and everything you hate about yourself comes spilling out into the world, and everything you love about yourself comes spilling out into the world, and you can't put it back. This books leaves you raw and exposed, clinging to love in a way that doesn't seem possible in words. Propels you to physically press yourself into your "person" and want to mold to them to fill any gap in your soul. That sounds terribly dramatic. I don't even care. This book destroyed me. It is perfection.

From Goodreads:

Two misfits.
One extraordinary love.

Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.

Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.

Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

Cute, sweet, heartbreaking story. It has its flaws, but I zoomed through it like I haven't with any book in a very long time.

I am super excited about this book because it was AMAZING!!!!! For once I have found a book that is a love story but it isn't all hearts, rainbows, and oh yeah predictable. This book I could honestly say I felt a connection with. Here you have Eleanor a chunky, curly red haired girl who is the new girl. When she starts her first day she gets on the bus and nobody would let her sit with them except for Park. Park is Korean and he is the only Korean kid in Omaha, Nebraska. At first he does not know what to think of Eleanor he does not want to even talk to her because she is so different. Then it happens he starts to like her, he doesn't want to but he does. Park comes from a middle class family where as Eleanor comes from a broken family. She lives in a trailer with her mom, her siblings, and her step-father Richie, who she does not even claim because he is a huge jerk face. This book has definitely become a favorite of mine and I will definitely be buying it to put on my own personal shelves at home. And the 80's music in it is a plus.

There is no chemistry, true chemistry, between Elanor and Park. Elanor is a smart girl, and she tells him he's silly but often times it feels like they move in a way that is more to move the plot forward then because they have any actual fleshed out motivation to.