Controversial Book

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky; Published by MTV
2 stars
Charlie is just entering his freshman year at high school and begins writing letters to an unknown person detailing everything that's going on in his life - his feelings of depression after his best friend, Michael dies, his unlikely friendship with two seniors, Samantha and Patrick (who treat him as a novelty and a sort of mascot at first). This book touches on issues of drugs, depression, sex, abortion, homosexuality, etc. These are worthy issues to bring out in the open and I understand why this book would be considered controversial. However, Charlie doesn't seem to correspond to the title of the book. He tells Sam that he is in love with her a couple of days after meeting her, he goes to parties, meets a local celebrity reporter at a gay meeting ground park, almost has sex twice, gets a girlfriend and...he hangs out with seniors (that's really cool!). This doesn't seem to be the work of a wallflower.

Although it was interesting learning about Charlie's new experiences (this much stuff certainly didn't happen to me in high school), Charlie's as a character is unfortunately extremely annoying. Charlie is meant to be your prototypically achingly special, literature-loving, introspective, wise beyond his years, sensitive boy that only a few people (including the new English teacher) can really learn to appreciate. His narrative voice is also annoying. It's the type of voice where you don't use complete sentences. And these incomplete sentences are meant to convey more. Because of their incompleteness and their repetitiveness. And you groan. Groan with irritation. And annoyance. It's also rather unrealistic that Charlie can catch the attention of his teacher with his English lit genius with this type of writing.
Also, as an insensitive sidenote, he cried too much. Charlie's adolescence is certainly a turbulant time and there are guys (and girls) who have cried a lot at high school...but I found his unabashed continuous crying over small things annoying and unrealistic. However, as I was writing this review, I realized that his fragile mental stability might have accounted for some of the crying.

I would give this book two stars for writing about interesting teen angst events. I was intrigued by Charlie's reactions to the events in his life and some of his introspective thoughts were a little insightful (i.e. his realizations in the school hallway that everyone, including the teachers, must have a life story to tell). I've known at least one teenage boy who enjoyed reading this book, and judging by the Amazon.com reviews, perhaps more people relate to Charlie's story than I thought. However, Charlie's characterization as well as a deux ex machina plot line at the end (that presumably explains all of Charlie's emotional problems) were extremely sore points with me. Teens may be attracted by the controversial subjects explored in this book and may (possibly) relate to Charlie with all his sensitivity, angst and incompleted sentences. This book would be suitable for teens 14/15 and older.