Review: Thirteen Reasons Why By Jay Asher

Title: Thirteen Reasons Why
Author: Jay Asher
Release Date: October 18, 2007
Publisher: Razorbill
Buy: Amazon



Goodreads Summary

You can't stop the future. You can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret. . . is to press play. Clay Jensen doesn't want anything to do with the tapes Hannah Baker made. Hannah is dead. Her secrets should be buried with her. Then Hannah's voice tells Clay that his name is on her tapes-- and that he is, in some way, responsible for her death. All through the night, Clay keeps listening. He follows Hannah's recorded words throughout his small town. . . . . .and what he discovers changes his life forever.

 Stop whatever you are doing right now. I don’t care if you are drinking your tea or saving a kitten; stop right now and read what I have to say about this amazing book… Okay everyone apart from those who are saving kittens stop; you guys can read this after you save the little baby.

Oh my freaking lord did I love this book! I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’ve recently been looking for a book to break my heart and jump around on it while laughing at me and even though I haven’t come across such book after The Fault In Our Stars this little book was kind of near… It didn’t rip my heart out, but it did shoot me with a lot of emotions.

So about the plot- Hannah commits suicide. But not before recoding the reasons for this choice. There are exactly 13 reasons that made her decide this is what she wanted to do. All the reasons link together and Hanna describes that as the “Snowball effect” I love that by the way. It is just so true! One thing starts something off like a rumour or a picture being sent out and every time someone joins in on this and comments or takes it further to hurt the person receiving the hate it creates a little snowball starting on top and going down the hill picking up speed and collecting more snow creating a much bigger snowball. Jay Asher was brilliant by adding this into his novel. You never truly know what you cause some people. Even if you do not mean it to, it can cause the sort of snowball effect for them by people making it worse and gradually it’s something you can’t even stop. “You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life.” -page 201. I love this quote! It’s just so true and so sad and so beautiful- If this doesn’t persuade you to read this book I have no idea what will.

Clay who received the shoe box of the cassettes listens patiently blaming himself for not helping Hannah and not realising sooner that she was having a problem and even considering ending her life. It’s so heartbreakingly beautiful! Because even though there were rumours and things being said behind Hannah’s back that may or may not have been true, Clay still had feelings for her. I feel bad for the guy. He did nothing wrong and yet he received a box full of cassettes with a dead girl talking to him telling him exactly how everyone did her wrong and what they all did. Throughout the book, he tortures himself listening to all the stories before him trying to work out exactly how a nice guy like him fits into all this mess. And he genuinely is a nice guy, he actually didn’t do anything wrong to anyone. By the end of the story Clay is so remorseful and feels so guilty that it breaks my heart. If he only knew how to reach out to Hannah and how to help her deal with everything before she took her own life he would have.

The style of the book is done so well that I wanted to weep before even reading the book. You get to read all of Hannah’s reasons and read all of thoughts that rush through Clay’s head as to why this all happened.

The ending. I was shattered by this. There’s Clay walking into school trying to hold himself together after understanding how someone that he spoke to, that he knew, that he kissed took her own life. Now he faced all the people that wronged her, all the reasons why she thought her life was worthless and why she wanted it to stop. When all the hope was, gone Asher sprinkles a spark of hope when Clay gives hope for us by hopefully saving a girl called Skye from going down the same path as Hannah. The ending was such a great way to say goodbye to a book that made me feel so many emotions towards a dead character that it was nice having the thought of her stories helping out a fellow character in need. That her death will not seem like a complete loss and she could even help other.

Okay that was quite depressing. I’m sorry for those that stuck around to read to the rest of the review (because obviously those who have not finished my review are off buying this book) If you want a good fast read and are not too afraid of feeing a lot of raw emotions at once then seriously check this book out. I know I go on and on about how everyone should read all the books, I love but this is something else. 

For those who have read this book- http://www.thirteenreasonswhy.com/tapes.php?video=6ushyNJhnrs