Reviews with content warning for Drug use - Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Reviews tagging 'Drug use'

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

16 reviews

juan_adhd_reading's review against another edition

emotional funny lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

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

2.5

It was fine. I really liked the format of the book, and how sometimes it changed to a script, bullet notes, etc. I think the way it’s written made it incredibly easy to read and finish quickly. I mean, it’s probably one of the fastest books I’ve read this year, and it provided a well needed break from the fantasy books I was reading before.

The thing is, I didn’t really liked the characters that much. And I get that Greg is not supposed to be a good protagonist, because this is at its heart, a subversion of the typical John Green sickly girl YA romance. But still, it kind of got tiring and a bit cringy at times. I think whether you like this book or not depends a lot on whether you find Greg funny. I didn’t really get it. His jokes were really childish and gross, more something I would expect from a 12 year old, but maybe I’m just getting too old for this kind of YA. Idk. Some of the jokes were borderline racist, homophobic or misogynistic in some way, which some might say it was the culture at the time, but is still no excuse.

Anyway, I still suggest giving it a chance, especially if you’re a fan of John Green but are looking for something different. I’m still gonna watch the movie, see how that goes.

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rafacolog's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

1.0

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pacifickat's review

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challenging emotional funny reflective sad medium-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

4.0

I'm not sure how to write a review of this book yet, but I'll probably update this later with some thoughts. For now, suffice it to say that the audiobook read by Thomas Mann and RJ Cyler is brilliantly done. I laughed out loud quite a lot, and Mann perfectly captured the voice and intonation of an awkward teenage boy.

Not sure this book would be published now with certain language and stereotypes being present in the storytelling, but to me it came off as believably 'of a time' and true to what teenage boys might have said and thought circa 2012.

Also, concerning this book being a target for school and library bans, I recommend reading this article explaining the offending passages as well as a defense by the author regarding their inclusion in the story:
https://deadline.com/2023/07/jesse-andrews-me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl-book-ban-florida-1235440379/

*UPDATE:* I finally have more to say about this book and why I liked it a lot more than I probably should have. This is a book about art and the human experience as told (messily) by a teenage boy with a foul mouth and a lot of (relatable) awkward internal monologuing. I was surprised how poignantly it capture the unbridgeable gap between artistic expression (human expression, really) and reality can be, and the frustration and existential pain this causes the main character as he attempts to understand and relate to his own interior landscape and the truth of what is happening to Rachel. The impossibility of it is profound in the end. Greg is also more vulnerable than he seems, and by paying attention to what he's NOT saying, between the jokes and meandering storytelling, one can learn a lot. In the end, art has limits as to what it can achieve, and is almost always more about the person who made it than anything else. It is, in essence, as narcissistic and self-involved as the teenager narrating this story.

Does the story 'fridge' the girl to move the male character's story arc along? Yes. Does it know it's doing it and talk about how arrogant and stupid that is? Also, yes. I will end this horrifying long review with three quotes from the book:

1. "[We had made a film about a thing, death, that we knew nothing about. Maybe Earl sort of knew something, but I knew nothing about it. Plus we had made a film about a girl who we really hadn't gotten to know. Actually, we hadn't made the film about her at all. She was just dying, there, and we had gone and made a film about ourselves. We had taken this girl and used her really to make a film about ourselves, and it just seemed so stupid and wrong that I couldn't stop crying. Rachel the Film is not at all about Rachel. It's about how little we know about Rachel. We were so ridiculously arrogant to try to make a film about her."

2. "[...] I hated myself for this, I was realizing how to make the movie I should have made, that it had to be something that stored as much of Rachel as possible, that ideally we would have had a camera on her for her whole life, and one inside her head, and it made me so bitter and fucking angry that this was impossible, and she was just going to be lost."

3. "It's not a good film. OK? Actually, it sucks. Because [...] we had pretty good intentions, but that doesn't mean we made a good film. OK? Because it's not about her at all. It's just this embarrassing thing that shows that we don't eve understand anything about her. [...] Just because something is weird and hard to understand doesn't mean it's creative. That's - that's the whole problem. If you want to pretend like something is good, even when it's not, that's when you use stupid words like 'creative'. Our classmates hated it. [...] If it was good, they would have liked it. They would have understood it. And if it was good, maybe it would have helped."

Is this book perfect? No. Is it OK to not create clear meaning and purpose out of what looks and feels like chaotic nonsense? Yes. Grappling with nonbeing while being a living, breathing, conscious person can feel baffling. The actual experience can ultimately be impossible to express, to actually capture, hold, and share. The beauty of this book is that it admits to that truth, that in trying to say something meaningful, we end up saying nothing sensical at all. And, paradoxically (impossibly, frustratingly, unintentionally?) perhaps the very opposite is sometimes true as well.

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koplomps's review against another edition

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tense medium-paced

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

0.5

What a douche of a main character and a fucked up best friend. The way they talked about their fellow female students was disgusting.

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tea_kettle's review against another edition

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funny reflective sad medium-paced

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

2.0

some weird vibes. it’s written from a teenager’s perspective, and it made me uncomfortable at times. the ways earl’s family is portrayed feels vaguely problematic, as well as others parts that feel like micro-agressions (namely when they try pho for the second time). the protagonist constantly shits on himself, and it’s a little annoying.
all that aside, it was an okay book; i liked the story, it was just a weird read. i suppose that makes it more accurate to the high school experience, makes it more “sincere”. i was not a fan, but i don’t regret reading it. the formatting was fun, and it was easy to get through. i do regret rereading it; it’s been a few years, and it was worse than i remembered.. this will be getting donated.

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sprucewillow's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted fast-paced

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

4.0

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shayna_hadassah's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

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

4.0

I really enjoyed this book! It wasn’t quite as funny as I’d hoped based on what I’d seen about it, but there was definitely some humor to lighten the mood on a pretty heavy subject.

Our narrator is a high school student who does actually sound like a high school student - the humor is crude for the sake of being crude, he’s smart enough to make some pretty good observations while not being a star student, and he’s not sure what the hell he’s supposed to be doing next. What I really liked about Greg is that he was an outcast by design - he was so afraid of sticking out in a bad way that he instead figured out how to be completely unobtrusive, which was a nice change of pace from books where the high school outcast is either resentful of it or has a holier-than-thou attitude about it. Greg’s just trying to make it through. His observations felt real and grounded.

I didn’t mind the framing device and actually think it was pretty clever, but some of Greg’s comments about it being a book he was writing pulled me right out of the story. I think the point was that what Greg was writing was starting to hit a nerve and he was being self-deprecating to try to draw attention away from that, but a few times I thought it was too heavy-handed.

I think my favorite thing about the book was Greg’s continued insistence that he didn’t have feelings for Rachel. I don’t think he did - certainly not romantically - but I thought it was interesting how much Greg was divorced from his own sense of what was important. He visits Rachel because his mom makes him, and he continues out of a feeling of obligation, but he never recognizes that that feeling

and the frustration he feels that Rachel seems to have given up

is because he does care about her.

I think my favorite part of the book is actually the very end because you can see that Greg is starting to get it. He knows what he should have made his movie about, he knows that Rachel was important because she was a person, unrelated to any relationship she and Greg had. And he understands that too late! It’s so sad because you could see he was almost there at different parts of the book but he didn’t understand until the situation had been and gone, and I think that that’s missing in a specific set of coming-of-age novels. Greg is a teenager who’s had a pretty average upbringing and not had to deal with stressors like this and he doesn’t know how to handle it. Earl calls him out on it and Greg is forced to understand that hey, the way he’s been living is no way to live! It’s an uncomfortable change and it hurts and it’s ugly, but there is an other side to navigate. It felt very real.

Overall I liked the story. Greg at times is a really good narrator and at others is a little too jarring. The characters were fun but I’ve definitely outgrown the high school story. I liked the lack of tragic romance - I think trying to add one would have cheapened the message.

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