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Author : Jay Asher
Title : Thirteen Reasons Why
Published : 06/0/2009
Pages : 320
Genre : Young Adult
Publisher : Penguin







     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 comes home from school to find outside his front door a mysterious box with his name on it. Inside he discovers a series of cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker - his classmate and crush. Only, she committed suicide two weeks earlier. On the first tape, Hannah explains that there are 13 reasons why she did what she did - and Clay is one of them. If he listens, Clay will find out how he got onto the list - what he hears will change his life forever.

     So not so long ago I binge-watched the t.v show of this on Netflix. At the time I had no intention of reading the book, but while I was at the bookstore last time they had it going cheap so I thought why not. Now I know this book has a lot of talk swirling around it, some saying it was the best thing they had read, others said it glorified suicide. All I had to compare it to was the show which I knew had changed a lot from the book.

     The book follows two main protagonists Clay is our guide in the present. Still reeling from the death of his friend. He is someone who we don't really get to know all that well, but somehow I got a sense of who he was. I think this is due to it not being his story, Our interactions with him are mostly his reactions to the things Hannah tells him through the tapes. He does feel like a good kid and throughout to me, he came across as an innocent bystander. Taking on the guilt of others and Trying to comprehend one Hannah would take her own life.

     When it comes to Hannah I think it would be far to easy to write her off as flake someone who did what she did for petty reasons. But this I think would be unfair to the character, This is a girl obviously dealing with mental health issues. And while it is not directly stated on the page it is hard not to miss the signs. She reads deeply into every interaction and sees signs where there are none. The problem with life is nothing is as straightforward as we would like. And the problem for Hannah is she sees a pattern of events in her life that she can't see a way to break free from.

     Asher has chosen to take on a topic that is a difficult one to understand. How do people come to terms with the suicide of a friend or loved one? He does this with some care but also doesn't really shy away from the hard facts of Hannah life.  This is a book about little things builds up inside someone to become a whole. It is a story that needs to be viewed as a whole rather than each separate part. Because untimely there is no clear-cut answer here. It also about taking responsibility for your own actions. This, however, in the end, is something that Hannah takes away from those in her life, In the making of the tapes, she forces them to confront not only her past but also there own. Unlike the t.v show the book takes place over a single night so we are only really left with how Clay deals with the information in the tapes. We never get to learn how each of the thirteen people chose to deal with the events.

     Is this the best book I've read on the subject of teen suicide, to be honest, no it's not. It has its flaws there are some things that could have been explored better and as I said I would have liked to see what happened to the others. That fact that the story is told through the tapes is defiantly a unique one and I found the book gripping enough that I finished in a day.