13 Reasons Why

Title: Thirteen Reasons Why
Author: Jay Asher
Pages: 288 (paperback)
Publication: June 2011
Summary: You can't stop the future. You can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret. . . is to press play.

Clay Jensen doesn't want anything to do with the tapes Hannah Baker made. Hannah is dead. Her secrets should be buried with her. 

Then Hannah's voice tells Clay that his name is on her tapes-- and that he is, in some way, responsible for her death.

All through the night, Clay keeps listening. He follows Hannah's recorded words throughout his small town. . .

. . .and what he discovers changes his life forever.

My Thoughts: You know that theory called the butterfly effect? How everything you do and everything that happens, even the beating of a butterflies wings, has an effect on the future. Every gesture, glance, moment of eye contact, or seemingly innocent action can be a build up to one of these "13 Reasons Why" Hannah Baker killed herself, it seems.

Let me just tell you right now that I really enjoyed this novel. It completely lived up to the hype it's been given and even drove me to tears at one point. Hearing Hannah's account on a set of cassette tapes of how she started down the road of depression and who influenced her to start down that path in the first place was haunting, but I loved it. It wasn't just one event or person she encountered that made her say "Hey you know what, why live?" It was an accumulation of those people and interactions and events as well as having to live with her own increasingly suicidal thoughts. I felt like this part of the story was accurate on a lot of levels, too, and I'm sure a lot of other people who have struggled with depression can relate to Hannah Baker's tale.

And you feel so bad for Clay, our narrator, because he's received these cassettes as one of the "reasons why." He seems like such a nice guy and even he has no idea why he's on this list at the beginning. My heart broke for him. And he has to listen to these stories about people he sees on a day to day basis, learn their dirty secrets, and now he can't look at them the same way ever again.

This isn't to say that Hannah wasn't a flawed human being. No, she certainly is, and she acknowledges that, which makes you like her even more (I can't stand a Mary Sue, can you?). Clay is also flawed, although it may not seem like it in the beginning. But this novel doesn't end as a sob story. It's intention is to make you think about your actions towards others and how you treat them, in my opinion. It built up hope in me which is why I loved it.
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars