There is literally a paragraph that says, “.she was apparently never going to stop sounding like she just got here yesterday from Korea. Everything she says is unnecessarily punctuated - ‘here’ turning to ‘hee-ya’, ‘Eleanor’ turning to ‘El-la-no’, and the list goes on. Park’s mum, Mindy/Min Dae (also unsure how to feel about that). Here’s a quick rundown of all the things that went wrong in this book: How was it possible for something so glaringly obvious to slip past right under my nose the first time round? (Spoiler: it’s called desensitization). Even after watching all of those videos and reading so many rant reviews, I was still taken aback. After rereading, it seemed like virtually every page was sticking true to the author’s name - a rainbow. So I pulled the book off of my shelf for the first time in 6 years, armed with three highlighters and determined to pinpoint everything that was wrong with it. This only led me down a rabbit hole of similar videos and articles….and yeah, they were pretty bad. The next day (because I’m a fervent believer that our phones and computers listen to our conversations) a video caught my attention on my YouTube recommendations: Reading Eleanor and Park in 2020 So You Don’t Have To. My memory was pretty fuzzy, though - all I could remember was that the two main characters were kinda weird,met on a bus, and fell in love. My friend and I discussed what we could remember about the book since we’d both read it when we were in intermediate. I was prompted to reread the book after seeing the recent news that a film adaptation was in the works. And after reading it for the second time? I couldn’t even give it participation points. But this was before I’d even thought of creating the box of: Doesn’t Do The POC Characters Dirty. At 11, this meant it checked all of the right boxes. And I liked it it was romantic, it included 80s pop culture references I pretended to understand, and it involved probably the only Asian protagonist on my entire bookshelf. I was around 11 years old, and Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell was just another addition to my ever-growing collection of YA novels with colourful covers.
Before I get into the real nitty-gritty of (almost) everything that’s wrong with this book, I feel that I should set out the scene for my own relationship with it.
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