Amber Russell Creative Writing
10/9/14 ` Book Review
DO YOU WANT TO BE IRRITATED AND CONFUSED?
Thirteen Reasons Why takes place in a small town through the perspective of Clay .Clay is a typical teenage boy who stays out of trouble and is infatuated with a beautiful popular girl named Hannah Baker who has recently committed suicide. His boring life gets turned upside down when he receives a box of cassette tapes from an anonymous sender.When Clay eventually gets to listen to the tapes he hears the voice of Hannah Baker and learns she made them before she died. In the tapes Hannah explains that there are thirteen tapes in the box and that there are twelve people responsible for her death (two tapes are dedicated to one person)
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Through these tapes Clay learns Hannah’s experiences and how the the bullying from some of her classmates lead her to commit suicide. Although creative, Jay Asher’s weaving between Hannah’s experiences and Clay’s thoughts is very confusing. The characters at times get mashed together in a way that makes it a chore to read and hard to decipher whose thoughts are whose. Jay Asher did do a great job on developing Clay as a realistic character and kept his personality consistent throughout the novel. However,he did not do as great with Hannah. Hannah comes off a whiny and eager to blame people for her death.Hannah was not a believable character at all. Her reasons for committing suicide are childish and are highly overexaggerated. The message of this novel is even somewhat unclear. Jay Asher makes all these people out to be evil for bullying her but really, what is Hannah doing? Some of the reasons are so petty and she’s causing psychological damage to them by saying that she caused them to die. Some of the people on the tape didn't even do anything to hurt Hannah and she makes them sit through the whole tape anyway thinking that they were