I liked Eleanor & Park, but not nearly as much as other people seem to have liked it, and I’m not sure why. It’s a YA love story set in Omaha in 1986, in which the two “star-crossed sixteen-year-olds,” as the flap-copy puts it, meet on the school bus and fall for each other without really expecting to or meaning to. Eleanor is the new girl in town, and the fact that she’s a chubby redhead who dresses in “weird” clothes makes her a target for teasing and bullying. Park is biracial—his mom’s Korean, his dad’s Irish-American—and isn’t quite at the bottom of the heap, socially, but isn’t exactly popular either, and spends his bus rides listening to his headphones or reading comic books. Eleanor’s home-life is terrible: she’s just moved back home after having been kicked out by her stepdad a year earlier; she’s the oldest of five kids, living in a too-small house with too little privacy and too little money; her stepdad drinks too much, hits her mom, and shouts at everyone. So, right: Park gives Eleanor a seat on the bus when no one else will, and then they keep sitting together, and they become friends, and then more than friends.
I think part of my problem with the book was structural: the first line is “He’d stopped trying to bring her back,” so you know Eleanor isn’t with Park at the end, and the tension of wondering what happens/how they end up apart is different from the tension of wondering what’s going to happen/how they’re going to end up, and maybe I would have preferred the latter. Another issue I had was maybe just me being the wrong reader for this book: Eleanor and Park bond over comic books and new wave music, neither of which I have any connection to. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the book made me understand why the characters feel a connection to those things, but I didn’t, not really. Park likes comics because … he’s a boy and that’s the kind of thing boys read? Eleanor likes them because they’re something he’s sharing with her? I could imagine comics being about escape or wish-fulfillment, but those things aren’t really mentioned; Eleanor and Park don’t really talk about comics that much (there is one good in-depth conversation about whether the X-Men comics are sexist). And I felt similarly about the music: after Park makes Eleanor a mix-tape, they talk about “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and she also thinks to herself that the music makes her “feel like everything, like the world, wasn’t what she’d thought it was. And that was a good thing. That was the greatest thing” (57-58). I wanted more of that.
One thing I thought was really great was the physical aspect of Eleanor and Park’s relationship, the way each of them rhapsodizes to himself or herself about how holding the other’s hand feels, the terror and delight of kissing, the deliciousness of warmth and skin and touch. I also thought the contrast in Eleanor’s personality and Park’s personality felt realistic—his openness, her defensiveness.
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