Sometimes books keep me up at night – not usually because I stay up into the wee hours just to finish them (I like my 8 hours of slumber) – but because thoughts, ideas and reactions to what I’ve read the day before keep rolling around in my mind, forcing me down rabbit holes or through mazes that I hadn’t expected.
Jay Asher’s debut YA novel, Thirteen Reasons Why, did that to me last week. In a series of cassette tape recordings, Hannah Baker reveals the web of reasons, the snowball effect, about why she has chosen to end her own life. The listener, Clay Jensen, doesn’t understand why he’s received these tapes in the mail as he reluctantly forces himself through tape after tape. He spends the night crisscrossing their town, getting to know a girl he had a crush on for years but was never brave enough to approach. He’s the first hand witness to the pain and struggle Hannah has dealt with throughout high school based on how others have treated and perceived her.
Asher tells 2 stories simultaneously – Hannah’s audio recordings that are sharp, poignant, wry and heart-wrenching – and Clay’s present tense narrative has he aborbs and reacts to Hannah’s story. Having Clay’s reactions interwoven in with Hannah’s narration lends a sense of urgency and painful realism to the story. Clay is both the “eyes and ears” of the reader but by also making him the subject of one of Hannah’s tapes, he is a character we can idenitify with and rely on in a chaotic world where no one is what they seem. After I read the book as it was written, feeling tossed about and troubled, I read through it again following just Hannah’s voice. In his interview at the end of the book, Asher indicates that he did write Hannah’s story straight through at one point, and I think reading it this way (after reading the book as written) was really thought provoking as well, since it allowed me to see the episode’s in Hannah’s life more clearly and in a direct line. The spiral downward was steep and quick and I searched again and again for handholds and points where she could have found help.
Asher states that his reason for writing the book was to illustrate that what we do and say, no matter how minimal, has an impact on someone else’s life. Hannah, Clay and all the characters in the story had incomplete and imperfect pictures of each other and no real idea what was going on with anyone else. And only by peeling back the layers could they even get a glimpse of the pain & truths of another – and for Hannah, it was too late.
- Posted by Cori
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