I guess those three A words describe The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Like The Fault in Our Stars, I thought I would not like Wallflower, partially because of all of the cliche and hipster like posts on Tumblr and of course the over quoted quote "And at that moment I swear we were infinite." But the book was.... well... it's a tad hard to really rate or describe how I felt about the book. I had mixed feelings about it. Before you go on just a warning; like The Fault in Our Stars, Wallflower is a book that if you know what the ending is it will ruin everything for you. So warning...
Charlie is a wallflower (well we should expect that since the title is The Perks of Being a Wallflower). I enjoy reading books in letter form and I did enjoy the form in this book, but the one thing that irritated me was Stephen Chbosky's writing style when he wrote from Charlie's POV. In the beginning he sounded like a little seven or ten year old boy instead of the fifteen year old he was supposed to be. But as I continued reading I began to see how naive and innocent Charlie was and I suddenly reminded of my writing when I was fifteen years old. Being a naive fifteen year old once upon a time, my writing resembled that of my ten year old self. But in later chapters I began to see Charlie's writing (and his speech, since he writes how he speaks) getting older as his year went by and as he began to grow.There are some theories that say that Charlie is autistic, but there is a fault in that. Charlie is someone who feels, he feels feelings so much more then normal people (could call him a empath). Autistic children are known to not feel very much and are very much oblivious to other's feelings so I don't believe Charlie is autistic. He is simply a young teenager who feels far too much. The ending did make you understand why Charlie is the way he is. But I was kind of disappointed that Charlie had just simply been abused by his aunt. Of course all of the signs led to it, but I was kind of hoping that Charlie was the way he is because that is how he is. Some people don't have reasons for having anxiety or for being over emotional (I certainly don't have any reason) and I wish that Chbosky could have writen about those who suffer for 'no apparent reason'.
The reason why I have a few mixed feelings about Wallflower is mostly because of the other characters. Chbosky spent so much time on Charlie and his feelings that you don't really care for the other characters. I didn't really care about Sam or Patrick or Charlie's family. There wasn't enough character development for the other minor characters I think.
The 'subplots', I guess you can call them, were slightly unbelievable. I have never gone to public school so I don't know what it's like, but there was just so much drama and angst. Of course angst is what makes up like 90% of young adult anything (novels, movies, TV shows, etc)! I was kind of disappointed in the stereotypical outlook of teenagers. It almost seemed like everyone had some kind of issue and almost everyone close to Charlie had been abused (sexually or physically). All of the angst just seemed to build into overly large bubbles of emotions and continually popped in your face. In short, it became kind of annoying.
Wallflower was hauntingly disturbing. I don't know if anyone else felt that way while reading it. For myself, personally, it was haunting. It was haunting in the way that I thought Chbosky was talking about me. I have anxiety and have experienced the feeling of going crazy, over thinking, over emotional, panic attacks, etc. So reading Wallflower brought up a lot of memories that I didn't really want to remember. During the time I was going through the panic attacks and stuff I tried to look for someone to blame. Like Charlie tried to find something to blame, but in the end "I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them."
