are thrown in the one place that rarely shows mercy to such outsiders: the school bus. And yet, this is where they find each other. This is where comics are shared, secrets are told, hands are held. This is where they find that in the face of the havoc that a first love can wreak to the uninitiated, is also a kind of calmness and stillness that it can give to the truly wanting. Sometimes love is chaotic, but sometimes it’s simple, too. And it’s beautiful in the way it can drown out the noise outside, enough for everything else to not matter, even for only a bus ride.
OCTOBER 2013
On the surface, it looks like just another young adult love story, about a girl and a boy who fall in love for the first time and the kind of hits they have to take for the feelings that cement their connection. It’s a story that has been told before, it’s a story that we already know. But the biggest triumph of “Eleanor & Park” is that despite the likelihood of predictability, it never feels unsurprising. With the weight of all the other first love novels behind it, you would think that this story would offer nothing new to the genre. Yet, Rowell manages to make it both familiar and unusual – it makes you remember your own firsts, while turning out to be nothing like yours. Eleanor and Park are both misfits, in every sense of the word. One is a skinny half-Korean comic book geek, the other a chubby, redheaded girl with a troubled past. They
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