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bee_knees 's review for:
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
by Jesse Andrews
I enjoyed this book way more than I anticipated.
The most common problem that people have with this Me and Earl and the Dying Girl seems to be that the protagonist is A) Unlikeable and B) A bad person. Both of these are 100% accurate. Greg is consistently selfish, whiney, vulgar, and prejudiced. The audience gets a front-row seat to all of this because of the conversational style of first-person narration. It essentially reads like something a high school boy would right all in one go without giving it too much thought. Which is the point. It intentionally emulations the off-the-cuff confessional of an immature narrator that is only just starting to see the flaws in his cynical, self-centric worldview.
I understand if you don't enjoy this type of thing, i.e. the "privileged middle-class white boy complains and self-deprecates while making several questionable of-colored comments for approximately 300 pages" books. I probably wouldn't had I not spent my formative YA consuming years with similarly detestable protagonists such as Holden Caulfield and any of John Green's male leads. I do not like these characters. They annoy me and often offend me. But they are well-written nonetheless, and I've built up a tolerance for them. I can relate to them in spite of myself, because I thought a lot like them when I was an angsty teenager, and I definitely knew people who talked or acted like a Greg Gaines or a Holden Caufield or what's-his-name from An Abundance of Katherines.
This book is a great representation of how experiencing loss does not serve to make the living wiser or more compassionate. Death is not romantic or illuminating; death is often random and always tragic. You grow as a person in spite of it, not because of it.
TL;DR: There are many reasons to not like this book. Maybe you hate 2010's YA. Maybe you hate that era's obsession with sick-lit. Maybe you just can't stand Greg as a protagonist. These are all legitimate reasons and I can't tell you that you should like it. But I think the stylistic and narrative choices made in writing this book were motivated and (usually) served to enhance it.
The most common problem that people have with this Me and Earl and the Dying Girl seems to be that the protagonist is A) Unlikeable and B) A bad person. Both of these are 100% accurate. Greg is consistently selfish, whiney, vulgar, and prejudiced. The audience gets a front-row seat to all of this because of the conversational style of first-person narration. It essentially reads like something a high school boy would right all in one go without giving it too much thought. Which is the point. It intentionally emulations the off-the-cuff confessional of an immature narrator that is only just starting to see the flaws in his cynical, self-centric worldview.
I understand if you don't enjoy this type of thing, i.e. the "privileged middle-class white boy complains and self-deprecates while making several questionable of-colored comments for approximately 300 pages" books. I probably wouldn't had I not spent my formative YA consuming years with similarly detestable protagonists such as Holden Caulfield and any of John Green's male leads. I do not like these characters. They annoy me and often offend me. But they are well-written nonetheless, and I've built up a tolerance for them. I can relate to them in spite of myself, because I thought a lot like them when I was an angsty teenager, and I definitely knew people who talked or acted like a Greg Gaines or a Holden Caufield or what's-his-name from An Abundance of Katherines.
This book is a great representation of how experiencing loss does not serve to make the living wiser or more compassionate. Death is not romantic or illuminating; death is often random and always tragic. You grow as a person in spite of it, not because of it.
TL;DR: There are many reasons to not like this book. Maybe you hate 2010's YA. Maybe you hate that era's obsession with sick-lit. Maybe you just can't stand Greg as a protagonist. These are all legitimate reasons and I can't tell you that you should like it. But I think the stylistic and narrative choices made in writing this book were motivated and (usually) served to enhance it.