Reviews with content warning for Car accident - Elämäni seinäruusuna

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Reviews tagging 'Car accident'

Elämäni seinäruusuna by Stephen Chbosky

224 reviews

beckyyreadss's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

I wanted to read this book because I feel like everyone has read this book. My friends kindly gifted me this book for my birthday this year. Let's just say that the ending of this book saved it.

This novel follows an observant wallflower Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant rollercoaster days known as growing up. This is a young adult contemporary fiction that focuses on mental health.

I love Charlie, throughout this whole book, I just wanted to hug him and let him know it’s okay. Me reading this as a twenty-two-year-old and still trying to navigate through life, understands Charlie and understands how difficult school can be. I feel like if I read this any younger, I probably wouldn’t have understood it as much. I loved the letters style of writing where it feels like Charlie is opening up to you, but I would have loved to actually know who he was writing the letters to, like Bill or his Aunt Helen or someone. I did struggle to get into this just as the book is split into four parts rather than chapters. But it’s only a small book that I managed to finish it relatively quickly.

This book was a tense read, but it definitely pulled on the heart-strings. I would definitely check the trigger warnings before you read this book as it is definitely a bit gruesome and can be very triggering for some people. I think anyone who ever feels like a wallflower should read this book. I rated this book three stars just because I was expecting more. I’ve seen all the reviews and it just didn’t live up to my expectations - I just wanted more. I would take another book of Charlie as an adult and to see what happened with Sam and Patrick and the gang.

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rosiecorse's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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jhbandcats's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Very hard book to read as it deals with depression, confusion of first love, feelings of isolation, sexual assault, homophobia, among other difficult and confounding issues. But because many of those issues are so universal (the depression, isolation, and first love, if nothing else), it’s easy to empathize with the characters, especially the narrator Charlie.

Charlie has always been a friendless outcast. He figures his high school experience will be the same but instead he makes friends with some seniors and develops a close relationship with a mentoring English teacher. The book shows Charlie’s struggles to navigate high school while doing his best to be true to himself and supportive to his friends. The love, joy, and anguish of being a teenager are palpable.

Beautifully written, warm, and bittersweet, this is a truly lovely book.

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phoebeisreading's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

beautiful book that talks about the cycle of abuse and overcoming and dealing with trauma. coming of age story that talks about an aspect of mental health i dont think is often explored in most media. ive never related to a character as much as i do charlie and i think the 20th anniversary copy is definitely worth it because the added final letter from charlie as a now older man ( i think 35??) really gives the book that hopeful ending and its made me feel so much better. definitely check the trigger warnings before reading. its 100% a comfort read for me as someone who had gone through similar experiences

FOR THE TRIGGER WARNINGS:
I have them listed out but the ones talked about in more detail in the book are : Rape, Sexual Assault, Drug and Alcohol use, Homophobia, Mental illness, Domestic/child abuse, Suicide

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miss_granger07's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

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delaneyy_'s review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

criticalgayze's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I have always referenced The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a pivotal text in my development as a reader and as a Queer person. It was one of the only books I reread as a young adult, and I often cited it as my favorite book of all time before the publication of Red, White, & Royal Blue.

For an upcoming episode of my podcast Let's Unpack That, my cohost and I are talking about pivotal media around our own coming out, so I revisited this book for the discussion. Of course, like everything from your youth, there is the dual discussion of historical contextualization around when you read it and the rose-colored glasses of youth that mean that this was very likely never to hold up as well in a 2022 landscape where I am now more than twice the age I was when I first read the book.

What still holds up is Chbosky's ability to turn a phrase. For a book that, as you can see below this review, comes with a deluge of content warnings, there is truly a compelling beauty here. Charlie is an incredibly tender and earnest voice, and I think that, minus the missing element of social media, the activities these kids get into and have happen to them stand up as being as relatable today as the 1991 setting, the 1999 publication, or my 2007-ish original reading.

Where the novel is weak it is mainly due to Charlie's passive involvement as a narrator. The novel is not about Charlie as much as it is the things he sees from his vantage point as a "wallflower," and this leaves a book that is low on narrative impact although it creates a beautiful snapshot of this "year in a life." Within this lens, I think there is also some narrative critique to be made of Charlie's (and Chbosky's) Queer voyeurism as both the storyteller and the story author are heterosexual men inhabiting largely Queer safe spaces.

I am left with a sort of nebulous wonderment of what about this novel shaped and what was merely in conversation with the youth I would go onto have and am in store for many longer internalized conversations.

Quotes:
It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book. (9)

Content Warnings