THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
**SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES**
“Eerie, beautiful, and devastating.” —Chicago Tribune
“A stealthy hit with staying power. . . . thriller-like pacing.” —The New York Times
“Thirteen Reasons Why will leave you with chills long after you have finished reading.” —Amber Gibson, NPR’s “All Things Considered”
You can’t stop the future.
You can’t rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.
Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why.
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.
Given the size of my library's wait list, I'm one of a bazillion people who read this after binging the Netflix series. If I hadn't seen the show first, I likely would have 4-starred the book. However, compared to the show, the book just feels lifeless and hollow. Despite following identical plots, in the book there is no rich development of all the characters into complex, multi-faceted people. The characters who are her "reasons" are just names without personalities. As a result, there's no clear picture that Hannah experiences the same trauma and stressors that her classmates do, but also struggles with depression and therefore doesn't have the coping skills to deal with it in a healthier way. Nothing in the book punched me in the gut or left me with an emotional hangover. Book-Hannah seems a little mean and immature, and her tapes feel more like revenge rather than a desperate need to be heard. The show feels so important, the way it slowly lays out how pervasive and damaging treating women as objects to own or conquer is, and how early it starts in a girl's life. The book scratches the surface of this theme but doesn't doesn't develop it enough. I'm so glad this book exists because it spawned the show, but the book alone isn't something that I would recommend.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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24 April, 2017:
Finished reading
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24 April, 2017:
Reviewed