Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Finished: December 8, 2018
Initially, a relative of mine told me he didn't enjoy the book and would not recommend that I read it at all, so I took his word for it. After that, I didn't really think about it for a few years until everyone was RAVING about the Netflix series. A little philosophy of mine is that the book is always better, so I bought the book and put it on my list of a million books to read. A few weeks ago, I was bored and decided to read a few pages. At the time (and currently), I was reading Jane Eyre, so I was used to trudging through thick language and taking an hour to read thirty pages. With this book, however, thirty pages took me about ten minutes. I was BLAZING through. In about 30 minutes, I had read almost half of the book. I put it away for a while then last weekend, I picked it up again and the rest is history. I'm a fast reader, but based on the time it took, the book is pretty short. The text is kind of big and spaced out so it's a lot shorter than it looks. The thing that got me, though, was the fact that Asher managed to pack so much meaning and power into such a short novel. The whole way through, I was turning pages like mad trying to figure out what happened and at the end, I was thinking, hang on... what's the huge massively horrible thing that made her do it? All these little things... then it hit me. All those little things were huge to her. That made all the difference. This book made me consider my own actions- you never know what little things can impact another person's life. When I started the book, I wasn't sure what I was going to get from it, but I think this book should definitely be read,  especially by teenagers because the impact it had on me was astounding, and not enough books like this about such a sensitive topic are out there.