Eleanor & Park: an exercise in suppressing your gag reflex

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"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."

It can't be denied - my teenage self would have lapped this shit up. However, coming at it as a 25-year-old woman, I feel less so inclined.

Scanning through some reviews on Goodreads, I noted someone had remarked that "nobody should write for teens who doesn't remember what it was like to be one. Rainbow Rowell remembers, and has captured it beautifully in this book." It's a very relevant point; the book positively oozes that special brand of self-conscious, insecure, angst that permeates and characterises the teenage condition. My problem is, it does it too well! To the point that I spent half my time reading suppressing the urge to projectile vomit across the room at the sickly sweet, desperately earnest, naivety of it all.

Anyone that knows me, knows that I love a good teenage coming-of-age yarn (albeit usually in cinematic form - a format which, mercifully, tends to circumvent many ardent and sentimental expletives from its protagonists) but this book was precisely the reason that I tend to avoid YA novels these days, and YA romance novels in particular.

The plot of Eleanor & Park is wafer thin. It's basically your standard boy meets girl teen love story with a little bit of domestic disharmony thrown into the mix to afford the lacking narrative a little dramatic flare. It's not that this is necessarily a bad thing; as I said, a younger version of me would have devoured the novel and asked for more. For proof, just skip back to 2007 when I proclaimed Twilight to be a work of pure literary genius (don't worry, I'm cringing too). Rowell's writing is highly evocative and though it adeptly captures those triumphant highs, crushing lows and stomach somersaulting moments of first love - quite simply put, it's all a little too much...

Before you call me an old cynic, out of touch with my inner impassioned teen, I'm pretty sure that even in the days that I found myself in the stickiest deep end of the teen romance treacle pool, I never came out with any statements as overly florid as the following; “I don't like you, Park, I... think I live for you. I don't think I even breathe when we're not together. Which means, when I see you on Monday morning, it's been like sixty hours since I've taken a breath." Proof can be found in my old diaries from that time where even I noted and was disgusted by the mawkish, saccharine sentiments that came to me by the minute, and did my level best to steer away from recording them.

TL;DR: Eleanor & Park is an evocative piece of YA emotional fiction that will no doubt enthral its target audience, but will probably make everyone else reach for the sick bag.

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