Maybe it's me?

I've said before that I cannot claim to always have good taste and that I've come to terms with that. The opposite side of being ok with liking something that everyone else hated, is  feeling a little eh about something everyone else loved. This doesn't happen to me all that frequently, but occasionally something comes along that I just don't get. This is not a commentary on the book at all. Many of the books I haven't been able to like have been well written and well loved volumes that appear on "Books You Have to Read" lists all the time. It also doesn't say anything about my taste in literature as I can love something literary just as much as something that is not so much so. It could be that  a particular book just doesn't speak to my personality. It could be that I'm not in the right head space to connect with a particular kind of story.

So confession time. I didn't like Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. That sound you heard is YA lovers everywhere gasping in horror. All I have heard about this book have been flat out raves, many times accompanied by expressive hand gestures and declarations of love. For some it seems to tap into a very specific teenaged part of themselves, where you remember what it felt like to fall in love with someone you randomly were thrown together with and the anticipation and joy that you felt leading up to time with them. That 15 year old self that is still very much a part of us and a chance to connect with it through the characters we read about is why I think so many adults read  YA fiction. At least it's why I do. And that's what was missing for me from Eleanor & Park.

Logically, I recognize that it's a good book. The writing is done well, the characters are fully formed and sympathetic, and there were plenty of lines that I stopped at and thought how wonderfully written and absolutely spot on they were. In a lot of ways the novel read very similarly to John Green, in that it was literary teen fiction that focuses on the emotional side of the coming of age experience. But for me at least I never had a moment when my 15 year old self got chills and gasped and declared that this book could be her secret life story, that defined her in a way that no adult could ever understand because god-mom-you-just-don't-understand-you've-never-been-in-love-like-this! And that what I wanted. I wanted to feel like the characters could have been me at one time. That if I'd read this as a teenager it would have been my favorite book, at least until the next one. In all honesty I wish I'd had that for E&P, because I always wish I'll have that in any new book I pick up.