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This review is pulled from my review on Good Reads. 


There is something, some line that you cross when you're reading a fantastic book. There are lots of wonderful books I've read that I think "oh that was just perfect and wonderful and I will tell everyone to read it." There are books that speak directly to me, books that have such relatable characters that I fall in love, find a new best friend, and barely can come up for air.

And then there are those few books, those beautiful rare specimens that feel like they're changing my life. That I'm in love with and obsessed with and completely overrun with, and then there is something, sometimes just the smallest detail, a simple sentence, a shining singular moment that pushes me over the edge, brings me to tears of joy and sorrow and grief and pain and love, to such great heights of emotion that the book has to be set down because I can't read it through the tears. 

Eleanor & Park kept me up until 2 in the morning reading it. I wanted Eleanor to be my best friend, for Park to be my boyfriend, I wanted to find Rainbow and hug her for a day for reminding me what it was like to fall in love when you're 16. Not fantasy vampire, post-apocalyptic, unrealistic Romeo & Juliet kind of love, but real, honest-to-goodness I can't live without this person because I've never felt this way about anyone and I cannot believe he feels the same and simply speaking on the phone is enough to make my entire brain melt and my heart pound and my palms sweat. Is it fleeting? For me? Of course. I mean, but no, because reading this tugged at so many heartstrings I didn't know how to breathe properly, and I realize that 16 year old love doesn't typically last but when you're 16, you have no fucking clue that it doesn't and that's what matters.

And all this was well and good, and Eleanor's life is so devastating in this novel that I simply want to pick her and her siblings and her mom up and move them directly into my home where they can have their own beds and plenty of food and happiness to spare. I am emotionally invested in these people and they matter to me. And then Eleanor compared her life to children's novels and my heart shattered into a million pieces all over the pages of the book and I had to set it down in order to pick them back up again. 

Page 294: 
"If Eleanor were the hero of some book, like the Boxcar Children or something, she'd try. If she were Dicey Tillerman, she'd find a way. She'd be brave and noble, and she'd find a way. But she wasn't. Eleanor wasnt' any of those things. She was just trying to get through the night."

I read the sentence about the boxcar children and my heart fell and surged and loved Eleanor and the Rainbow Rowell just a little bit more. The Boxcar Children, those stories that all of my generation have at the very least heard of and many of us have read. Those books that still get plenty of use in my library today. Sure, I read them religiously for a while, alongside my babysitter's club books, stacked up by my chair on the porch, but the boxcar children are still a generic experience for readers of the world, and even non-readers. We all know them. 

It is that second sentence, that shout-out to readers, that perfectly worded sentence that doesn't mention an actual book, just Dicey, that immediately shouted to me about Homecoming and Dicey and walking hundreds of miles with her siblings and hiding in ditches and sticking to the woods and eating at the park and picking up odd jobs at grocery stores when she could so she could feed her family. With just that tiny little mention of Cynthia Voigt's heroine, I burst promptly into uncontrollable tears and had to set the book down to write this all out and get it down on paper (screen) before I forgot how strongly it made me feel all the feelings.



AND NOW that I have finished it, I can tell you honestly that I still think about it frequently, that it has embedded itself into my thoughts and dreams, and I can't recommend it to you strongly enough. 




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