Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
So for my portfolioclass we had to make a website about one product. We could choose whichever kind of ‘product’ we wanted, as long as the website was suited for the target audience.
I chose to write a book review, and even though I can’t post the site itself here (it’s hideous btw, thankfully we are learning styling this week). I can post the book review!
The book review is about The Perks of Being a Wallflower, one of my favorite books. Please let me know what you think of the review in the comment section below!
Introduction
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult book written by screenwriter Stephen Chbosky. It is his first novel and sadly his only. The book follows a boy who calls himself ‘Charlie’ and who is writing letters to a girl he thinks will understand, or at least listen to him. The girl is never in the book and is probably just a way for Charlie to be able to write about what is happening.
The book has been adapted by Chbosky into a movie. I first heard about this book, when a friend of mine mentioned it as a must-read, and I have read it at least twice since. And recommended it to at least a dozen people.
Why I love it
This book is quite hard to write or talk about, without spoiling the plot. This is actually one of the reasons why I love it. The story is quite calm, just a boy telling about his life. He feels he is nothing special, but suddenly he makes a couple of new friends who beg to differ.
They take him to parties and to a cinema screening of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, which is a cult movie where everyone dresses up as the characters and act out the movie while it plays. He starts making more friends and is almost leaving his ‘wallflower’ position.
And so the story kind of carries a long. But you can feel something is off. Not the things that are happening, they are the exciting things every wallflower hopes to one-day experience. No, there is something off with Charlie. Obviously telling more means spoiling the book, but the ‘something off’ is definitely the main attraction for me to the book.
The writing style of the book is from Charlies perspective as he writes it down in a letter. So the reader of the book is reading his letters. This sometimes leads to big time lapses, which I sometimes find confusing. Because I usually forget what the date was of the last letter. However it doesn’t conflict with reading the book. The book is called ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ and the story goes that Stephen Chbosky was writing a different story when he wrote down the line ‘I guess that’s just one of the perks of being a wallflower’ and he realized that was the kind of boy he wanted to be writing about. I think this reflects in the way Charlie writes the letters. You know he has been to the things he writes about, but still he keeps writing about it more as an observer than an active participant. This fits perfectly with his character, and therefore I feel it adds greatly to the whole feel of the book.
Recommended for:
I would recommend this book for people who are looking for a coming of age novel that reads easily, but will still surprise you at the end and leave you wondering about your own life in a slightly depressing, but mind-broadening way. It is definitely one of my favorite books and the movie adaptation is also worth a watch (after reading the book obviously).
I hope you enjoyed the review, I will probably post next weeks assignment as well. It is very similar, except that we also have to do some styling for the website.