Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell (Also, The Fault in Our Who?)

In Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried, there is an idea called storytruth. Storytruth is different from happening-truth in that it reflects not of the facts of the story, but the truth of the storyteller. Storytruth lets the reader feel what is real -- more real than facts, more real than dates and names -- Feelings. Consequences. Fears and desires.

Rainbow Rowell's novel Eleanor & Park is storytruth.

And storytruth, my friends, is the point of literature.

Rowell's voice, her characters, her descriptions are so deeply authentic. So perfectly crafted. Park's eventually-black-kohled eyes above his "Kiss Me I'm Irish" t-shirt and Eleanor's at times luscious at times unmanageable red curls are drawn in the most precise detail.

And, Dear Reader, you will love them.

Now, when I heard about this book, I thought -- haven't we had enough of this star-crossed lovers nonsense? Is the young adult market so limited that we must spend the rest of our days reading John Green knock-offs?

Well, like The Hunger Games and the lesser known Divergent (see my review here), Rowell in not only not a knock-off of her better-known fellow author. In my opinion, her work is vastly superior.

And a ton more fun to read.

And her characters way cuter and more loveable and more real all at the same time.

And aside from the (inevitable?) over-enthusiastic English teacher/R&J allusion (We have to be over enthusiastic. It's our job to make the kids a little uncomfortable), Eleanor and Park seem mercifully independent of the stars. And, indeed, of everyone and everything else. Theirs is a complete world, a world at once tender and sexy and every bit as difficult as being -- not just a real teenager -- but a real human.

There is a down-to-earth quality in Rowell's voice that leaves me convinced that she is every bit as much herself, and has always been, as her formidable heroine Eleanor.

Also, in an interview with Publisher's Weekly, Rowell said this:

My junior high and high school existence was depressing, and this [music] made me think there was something else, that someday I’d be an adult and I’d be able to get to it. I wanted Eleanor to have something more than her difficult home life, and I wanted Park to have something to give her, and music did both those things.

An almost gritty edge to the story gives it terrific complexity, yet it is also as bright and pretty and hopeful as we wish all of our love stories to be.

Eleanor and Park find the other world in this one for one another and for the reader.

Reader, you're gonna love it.