13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher

3 stars

“You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have is...now.”  

My fourth reread of September and it was 13 Reasons Why. I first read it when I had just turned 14, I got it for Christmas and spent all boxing day reading it. It was also my first review on goodreads (which I will add in for the sake of my updated review). I had a lot of feelings about it then and I have a lot of feelings about it now.

I loved the book but then I hated it also which makes the rating difficult but I did love it while hating it. I'm feeling very conflicted towards this book and I'll tell you why. This book was brilliantly written, it was suspenseful and I couldn't put it down. The thing that bothers me is those reasons while horrible and maybe more had happened before she moved that broke her down and made her incredibly vulnerable but I feel like some of that needs to be explained otherwise those are horrible ye I loved the book but then I hated it also which makes the rating difficult but I did love it while hating it. I'm feeling very conflicted towards this book and I'll tell you why. This book was brilliantly written, it was suspenseful and I couldn't put it down. The thing that bothers me is those reasons while horrible and maybe more had happened before she moved that broke her down and made her incredibly vulnerable but I feel like some of that needs to be explained otherwise those are horrible yet ridiculous reasons to commit suicide over. You should understand that I thought this book was fantastic and I like to not let the slightly ridiculous reasons ruin the engrossing and all round great writing so I do like to think that she was torn down before making her solution more understandable. There you go, my 14 year old self's review of 13 Reasons Why. Three paragraphs long and I can tell you, this review will be much longer. Also, I'm honestly surprised at the level of sophistication in my vocab there. I just desperately wanted to impress everyone. So, I still tend to agree with everything I said then even if a little bit of it wasn't as well said as I would have liked. I think I now have the ability to explain everything a bit more thoroughly with more reasoning. I've included my old review simply because it is a reread therefore I like to have my old thoughts neatly in with my new thoughts to see how I've grown as a reader and a person. I tend to think a lot of what you think of a book can be related to you as a person. Firstly, I really do agree with the love hate thing I talked about. I loved the book for it's writing and whatever else but I hated it for Hannah. I don't mind saying I hate what Hannah did, it was cruel, truly cruel. Sending around tapes blaming people who had the tiniest part in your own suicide in sincerely horrible. These characters will be ridden with guilt and anger for a very long time, some of them did, admittedly, not nice things but how were they to know what Hannah was going through. And to send the tapes the Clay is absolutely horrid. I don't really agree with it, yet I loved the suspense filled writing and the way I was determined to keep reading so I could discover who did what. I also think that the whole point may have been to be ridiculous, to be petty, to be whatever else. While reading it I kept thinking to myself, maybe Hannahs 13 reasons are supposed to be like this, maybe this is what Jay Asher is going for. Maybe he's making the suicide victim one of the villians of the story. I mean, I don't know but to me I kind of thought that it seemed like whatever he did was on purpose. I personally don't think it's right to blame all those people Hannah blamed. Sure, some did horrible, horrible things but also some did things that they couldn't have possibly known was going to result in Hannah's suicide. I'm a strong believer in you're the one who decides these things. No one forces you to commit suicide and even Hannah sort of said that which made me confused about why she was making the tapes. This book did enforce how quickly things can snowball out of control, though. Maybe that was the purpose of this book. To tell you how quickly things can get out of control even when you don't intend for them too. One things can quite quickly turn into the other and in the end the result can be pretty drastic and they can end in people feeling the way Hannah did. Sincerely hope no one else is experiencing this at the moment but I do think it had an important lesson of to be careful of what you say and do to others. Despite the negative things I feel about it, I still believe the writing was of good quality. It was engrossing and I think the general idea was awesome. In the end, I don't know what Jay Asher's intentions for this book were. Maybe they were like I suggested but maybe he genuinely wanted this to be what it is. Without really knowing much about intentions, I feel as though I can't judge it too harshly and in the end I did like it.