Well. We’ve all had our share of
depression, right? Right. Sometimes authors just want to shed a little light on
a topic that’s hard to swallow, and suicide is one of those stickers that
lodges itself in your throat. No one wants to talk about it. Why? I don’t know,
but Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
gave me a little more insight into how everyone affects everyone.
I had never really thought about it
before, but Hannah Baker is right. Everyone does affect everyone, and whether
we like it or not, our lives intertwine with EVERYONE ELSE’S ON THE ENTIRE
PLANET. Let me give you an example.
I may know someone who lives in
Colorado who teaches a kid whose parent runs a business that has dealings in
California. Well, the California business trades and has close ties with
corporations in Japan, and this corporation deals with the distribution of
emergency supplies to third world countries, and one shipment going out has the
boss’s right hand man on board. The right hand man knows a worker in Africa
that’s from New Zealand, who’s a recorded artist with three albums, who works
with relief efforts to dig wells in this country their relieving. The kids in
the country go to schools built by a Russian missionary who attended seminary
in France and made several European friends, including a French woman who works
with an American who lives in Sweden now, and this American is married to an
Icelandic woman who has British friends, including my own cousin. My cousin
knows me. And I may know someone . . . .
You get the picture.
That being said, we affect everyone
we come into contact with. And Jay Asher displays this really well in Thirteen Reasons Why. Clay Jensen’s
receiving of the tapes is a catalyst to a whole world of introspection. How did
he make Hannah Baker’s life different? How did he interact with the very people
who betrayed her and made her life miserable? Did he take time to know her
parents and even her? He felt extreme guilt, overall, because her reputation
scared him. And because he didn’t get to know her so they’d talk and she’d have
someone to vent to, she bottled everything up. And when she bottled everything
up, she got to thinking. And when she got to thinking, she thought no one truly
cared and decided that her life was meaningless anyway; why not end it?
You see? Human strings are
entangling.
The novel hit close to home for me.
With God’s amazing help, I’ve persuaded two friends out of suicide. They
started caring because someone else did. They saw the value in life because
someone saw value in them.
Looks like this review turned into
more of an essay-like thing, huh?
Well, let me quickly break down what
I thought of the novel. Plot was interesting, and I’ve never seen a book that
deals with suicide deal with it like this before. Everything else has the victim’s
family and stuff looking back, but this was from the victim’s viewpoint
herself, which was neat, and sad. Characters were real—and sometimes
infuriating. I wanted to personally kick Bryce Walker below the belt, and the
same with Justin, who let Courtney get raped. And I felt bad for Clay because
he wanted so badly to tell Hannah not to do it, that she was valuable . . . but
it was too late. That hurt the most. Mechanics and grammar were fine, and the
viewpoint was really done well. The book would have dragged and suffered under
anything other than first-person present tense.
Overall, Jay Asher did a really good
job handling a prickly topic with gentle hands. Brutal, but gentle. Eight
flipped pages out of Ten.
