I've meant to read Eleanor & Park since it started receiving rave reviews after it was first published. I even referenced it in a short story I wrote. It felt like a timely marker in time.

It's a fine book, though not nearly as beautifully haunting as I expected, mainly because the spark between Eleanor and Park seemed to lack. Oh sure, the relationship is believable after the fact, just not at the start of it. The two appear as alien to each other as Rowell makes them to everybody else, except that Park is more accepted by his peers than we are led to believe on the front end.

Still, Rowell does get much of it right. Set in 1986, he picks up on the common bullying back then, although we were fortunate to miss out on Asian racism, as Park suggests, but never really experiences in the book. (Park is half-Korean, and Rowell suggests this bars his entrance into the highest social circles at school). Eleanor is also an outcast — a poor, overweight new kid in a crowded at-risk household. 

They find each other because they are forced to sit together on the bus to school and back. When Eleanor begins reading Park's comics over his shoulder, he introduces her to the world of superheroes and some awesome music that goes against the pop culture grain of the era (but was ravishingly recast as essential by the 90s). From comics to music to holding hands, it all seems too convenient to be interesting. 

More interesting, perhaps, is the growing tension inside Eleanor's household as her alcoholic stepfather escalates his abuse from mental to threateningly physical. But don't expect that to be fully resolved. Rowell wants us to feel some heartbreak and resolution in the relationship that never really happened on the John Green level for me.