13 reasons why book review

I’ve never had an emotional connection with a book before, until novelist Jay Asher made me feel as if I had known the main character Hannah Baker my entire life when she commits suicide. Hannah committing suicide came as a shock to many because seemed to have a sequence of unhappy, small incidents that might impact any teenage girl’s life. Most of her problems dealt with low key bullying, although some was sexual. A boy Hannah kissed in the park spreads the rumour that she is easy. She just moved to a new school and her new friends, needless to say, are not the most supportive bunch that Hannah needs. But this goes to show that you don’t need a traumatic experience to send you off the deep end, all it takes is for the little things to add up. Clay Jensen, your average high schooler, receives a package in the mail with thirteen taped messages inside, plus a map with a number of places circled. Clay soon finds out that they are from Hannah, telling Clay her story, and why she decided to commit suicide. Hannah made 13 different tapes with 13 different messages to 13 different people. In the tapes, Hannah describes their role in her life. The tapes, ask for each person to listen all the way through and then to pass them on in such an order that all the designated people hear what Hannah has to say. Hannah doesn’t want the tapes to become public knowledge so she threatens that there is a second copy of the tapes and if the people who received the tapes didn’t follow Hannah’s requests, the tapes would be shared with the school. When Hannah sent signals that she was considering suicide, students and staff failed to do much about it. Which is the reason that Clay, who seems like a good guy, is on Hannah's list. He, for a long time, had a crush on her, but allowed social ­awkwardness to keep him from acting on Hannah’s ­cries for help. While nastier boys have violated Hannah's trust in herself and others, Clay's crime is the one that hurt the most. Clay wants to obey her last requests and to hear her story because he wants to understand. As he deals with the tapes and passes them on he thinks about his own actions and how they hurt her. While he works to understand what happened to her, he learns many life lessons. He learns to speak up, and he realizes that every action impacts others in some way. Hannah’s tapes explain how she wants the people in her life, and the teens reading her story, to become more aware of how we affect the lives of others every day. When a friend recommended Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, I was hesitant because I thought it would be depressing since it is about a teenager committing suicide. Instead, I soon found out that the book tells much more than just that incident. It focuses on the importance of speaking up and not hiding away when someone starts to act differently. They need help to pull their life back together, or they could become too unhappy and lose the desire to live. The book is relatable, not with the suicide aspect of the book,but in how all of the characters are teens, dealing with problems while learning from mistakes and trying to fix them. The book showed me that just because someone doesn’t share their sob stories that doesn’t mean that they are okay.