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Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Another book with a gender ambiguous author name (S. J Watson Before I Go To Sleep immediately springs to mind). Jay is in fact a male not a female. Yes I get that Jay can be a boys name but it can also be female and the presumption when reading a book set around a teenage girl is that the latter would be the case. I was reading an article the other day and apparently this is a trend right now with male authors in this genre being encouraged to create vagueness around their gender as to boldly state they were John, Dave or Rodger sells fewer books. Would you ever put a book down because it was written by a male (or female) author? Enough of us apparently would.

This wasn’t the only name changing going on here, the main character in the book Hannah was originally supposed to be called Anna with Mr Asher wanting the book to be called Bakers Dozen (Thirteen reasons, bakers, get it?) which I think I actually preferred.  
Be the lead called Anna or Hannah I didn’t like her. I found her thirteen reasons for committing suicide quite silly. I understand that Asher was trying to capture the butterfly effect and that we should all think about the effect of our actions but for me Hannah just came across as too attention seeking – such as when she left the last tape empty apart from the words 'thank you' at the very end, just in case anyone listened all the way through. She liked the impact the tapes would have after her death.
Hannah also came across as very self-absorbed, the biggest example for me being the rape. I felt myself getting really angry that Jessica, the true victim, and the impact the rape had on her wasn’t even touched upon yet we had to read pages about Hannah's reaction and how it impacted her. Again the knocking over of the stop sign was all about Hannah not about the boy who died or the guy who accidently killed him. I was surprised that Clay didn’t pick up on Jessica and whether she was ok once the supposed golden boy had listened to that particular section of the tape.
That being said I liked Clay, how couldn’t you? I found it silly that Clay was on the list at all. It was almost spiteful of Hannah to include him and then to keep him waiting until whatever number he was on the tapes. We as a group did discuss Hannah's actions as being stereotypical of a teenager (the self-absorbedness) and also talked about depression impacting on people's ability to reason and act logically and whilst I do appreciate this is the case the book just didn’t cut it when it came to be a serious consideration of teenage depression/suicide ad for that reason Hannah became unlikeable.   
We did pick up on the fact the book was aimed at teenager however it didn’t entirely feel like a teenage book (unlike A Dark Dark Wood, see our previous blog here). The dual narrative between Hannah and Clay made it complicated to read at times even for experienced readers. I did quite like the format being different to other books I had read so gave the book an extra point for that when it came to scoring.
The book has recently been dramatized shown as a thirteen part TV Series on Netflicks. It did at times feel like there were a lot of characters in the book but I can imagine this would have been perfect TV. I do groan inwardly when I find a book has been dramatized, its so common at the moment that it really feels like books are not written to be books anymore but as a stepping stone to the screen be it small or large which does impact the reader. A couple of the group had watched the TV series and one of the most common phrases in the meeting was "in the tv series it was better.' When a book group prefer a TV programme you know it's not a good sign for the book.
I finished the book feeling like I had read a poor mans Jodi Picoult, particularly The Pact. It didn’t emotionally affect me in the way Picoult does and I forgot most of the characters names by the time of the meeting which is never a good sign.
The group did however find lots of issues to talk about which isn’t always the case even if we like the book. It's also very easy to read so gets two points from me for those points alone. I ended up giving it a 6 with it averaging 5.5. Overall no one unfortunately was particularly impressed with the book

Next book of the month is The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan.



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