“He’s a wallflower.”
“You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.”
Stephen Chbosky’s first novel is able to credibly give voice to a 15-year old, precocious, socially awkward young boy named Charlie that you’d start thinking that Chbosky himself invented letter-writing in novels to tell a story.
“The Perks of Being A Wallflower” is a series of letters written by Charlie in an attempt to explain and figure things for himself. The recipient of these letters is unaware as to who Charlie is as there is no return address indicated. Charlie just “needs to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have”.
You will want to hug this boy and tell him everything will be all right as he pours his heart out letter after letter recounting his first year in high school. He grapples with issues of girls, dating, friendships, family life, honesty/dishonesty, smoking, teenage sex, and drugs. He probably thinks at some point that it is easier to get straight As compared to putting himself out there to “participate”.
Charlie’s teachers know that the boy is special. In fact, Bill, one of his teachers, has been giving him extra reading assignments on top of his regular work load (On the Road, Naked Lunch, The Stranger, This Side of Paradise, Peter Pan, A Separate Peace, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, Walden, and The Fountainhead).
“The Perks of Being A Wallflower” is not only about teenage angst but also touches upon seriously sensitive issues of teenage suicide and child abuse without turning the book into one big horror show.
The book, painfully poignant in some parts and funny in others, manages to convey the message that notwithstanding teenage turbulent years, young people will be able to come out of this tunnel with the guidance of family, help from persons in authority, company of good friends, and even look back at those years and say, “And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
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