Goodreads Review: Thirteen Reasons Why

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You can’t blame me for having high expectations for Jay Asher’s debut, Thirteen Reasons Why. Even if it hadn’t been hyped all over the blogosphere, its very pretty* cover tells the story of its accolades: a New York Times bestseller, a Kirkus starred review–why, it even bears a cover blurb by Sherman Alexie! It would have to be a rare book to rise to such lofty expectations. Unfortunately, Thirteen Reasons Why did not prove to be that book. Instead of the “brilliant and mesmerizing” story of the suicide of a teenage girl, it proved to be little more than tragedy porn. While I might not be able to conjure thirteen reasons why Asher’s debut fell flat for me, I can at least offer a solid handful.

Persistent problems with voice. If industry experts–publishers and agents–are to be believed, the most pressing concern for any writer writing for and about contemporary teenagers is voice. We should, they tell us, write honestly and accurately, capturing the speech and thoughts of today’s teens.

Unfortunately, I found the voice Asher uses not only inauthentic, but fairly distracting from what’s a unique concept and should be an enveloping read. Thirteen Reasons Why is, in fact, narrated by two parties–the first narrator, bookish nerd Clay, is mourning the suicide of the second, popular girl Hannah Baker, who narrates via a series of cassette tapes that form a long-form suicide note. But you’ll note that I said that Ashes uses a “voice” here, not “voices.” Because it’s true–save for the fact that Hannah’s narration is set in italics, it’s indistinguishable in style and tone from Clay’s.

It’s a voice that’s far more appropriate than for Clay than Hannah, stilted and overly formal and frankly kind of awkward. Asher’s word choices are odd–once, he refers to a store that has “all the best candies” rather than “all the best candy.” And it’s filled with clunky repetition that doesn’t quite manage to ascend to poetry, stuff like: “It was never a lost poem, Ryan. And you never found it, so it did not belong in your collection. But in your collection is exactly where other people found it. That’s where teachers stumbled across it right before their lectures on poetry. That’s where classrooms full of students cut up my poem.”

In small doses, such repetitions might have been an effective device, but it’s constant here, distracting and not altogether artful. And the conflation of Clay’s and Hannah’s voices have me convinced that this wasn’t entirely intentional on Asher’s part–that it represents a lack of control rather than a deliberate artistic choice.

A bizarre preoccupation with the sexuality of its female lead. Mind, I have no problem with sexual content generally or the sexuality of teenage girls specifically–in fact, I think that all young adult authors have an obligation to talk honestly of the real lives of their target demographic, which includes sex. But in Asher’s case, it’s not only Hannah’s sex life that’s held up to scrutiny but instead her purity. Ten of thirteen of her “reasons” for committing suicide concern either her reputation or the reputations of other teenage girls. And, while my own experiences and the experiences of women I love have taught me that non-consensual sexual exchanges are all too common, the way that Asher discusses forced sexual interactions has a certain flatness–it lacks the guilt, the fear, the confusion, the complexity with which teenage girls actually regarded these experiences.

Bottom line, when Hannah says “I think that’s the reason, in my dreams, my first kiss took place at the rocket ship. It reminded me of innocence. And I wanted my first kiss to be just that. Innocent,” and “I’ve had my butt grabbed before–no big deal–but this time it was grabbed because someone wrote my name on a list,” I just didn’t believe that this was the reaction of a teenage girl. Instead, it sounds like the reaction of an older man–a dad, maybe–and the type of propriety-obsessed reaction he’d like her to have to both her budding sexuality and to complicated and sometimes unsavory sexual encounters. It felt male gazey, a suspicion that only deepened during a scene where Hannah and a female friend mime a porny massage for the benefit of a Peeping Tom, a scene that was a major WTF for me.

A story that keeps the reader at arms’ length. Many of Hannah’s “reasons” seem trifling–and it’s not entirely clear whether Asher meant this as intentional or not. More troubling, though, is the implication that there are deeper reasons that go unexplored–more compelling and potentially more emotionally affecting. For example, it’s implied that Hannah’s parents own a failing business, but the impact of this on Hannah’s life is hardly mentioned, and her parents aren’t even described. Further, hazy references to Hannah going on successful dates are made, but we never see these interactions, either. And most importantly, we never get to hear the conversations she has with Clay, either during their tenure as coworkers at a movie theater, or during a party near the novel’s climax. This makes it difficult to believe that these characters have any genuine chemistry with one another. Clay tells us that he loves Hannah, but we’re only told and never shown any evidence for this. Instead, we got cheesy and frankly unbelievable anecdotes about student poetry disseminated by teachers for public ridicule, about Peeping Toms, about car crashes. This distance, on all levels, meant that I just never quite believed that the story could possibly happen as told. Though the premise was innovative, and the hype quite loud, and for all the promise of Asher’s premise, I didn’t buy it.

*Pretty, but like everything about this novel, flawed. I mean, what teenage girl swings in white pumps and ruffled leg warmers. Who does that?

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