In regards to my writing progress, I decided to try a completely different approach since my last update. I decided to try a more extreme version of outlining that involves summarizing each storyline from beginning to end. I've only been working on Charlotte's so far, but it's had some surprising results so far. I've completely nailed down her backstory with Storm (who has since been renamed... for reasons that I'm actually very excited about), and now I'm figuring out the details of each of the three interviews she conducts with Her Highness. Occasionally, I still run into some mental roadblocks, but I've since developed a way of countering it--by picking up a book and reading. Which leads me to my newest book report:
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Like many of the other books I've been reading recently, Eleanor & Park is one that I'd been hearing lots of rave reviews about. I was intrigued for a number of reasons: 1) Gayle Forman wrote a blurb that mentions "punk rock" and "true love" -- two elements that are totally up my alley; 2) serious high school contemporaries are also my thing; 3) Park is half-Asian. When's the last time I ever read about a male protagonist who had any trace of Asian heritage in him? (Answer: NEVER)
Well, I read this book really fast. I'm a notorious speed-reader, but this was much faster than normal. I have a confession to make: I skimmed the middle. I found myself wanting to skip ahead to the end. I even considered putting the book down at about 40 percent in, which is a rarity for someone like me who usually plows through in one sitting. Here are some talking points about the story, which might help elucidate why I reacted towards this book in such a way:
1. The Romance
FYA rated the swoon scale for this book a perfect ten. If we were talking about only the first third of the book, then I would agree--the scenes on the bus when Eleanor and Park start developing feelings for each other were adorable and really captured, in my opinion, how intense your five senses become when you're a teenager with a crush. I think Rowell managed to write the hottest chaste-hand-holding scene in all of English literature.
But for someone like me who prefers her love stories with a slow torturous burn, the build-up for Eleanor and Park's relationship moved too fast. After they got together, which happened less than halfway into the book, I grew disinterested in all the "I-love-yous" and "I-miss-yous" and the typical teenaged sweet-talk. After that, I couldn't tell where the story was going to go--and hence, I started losing interest. Perhaps I'm more plot-driven than I imagined myself to be, but I skimmed ahead partly because I began wondering, "So... now that they're together, what's next?" The family storylines of Eleanor and Park were intriguing, so I thought maybe Rowell would chase after those tails... but in the end, there really wasn't any true closure for Park's issues with his father nor Eleanor's problems with her dysfunctional family.
And the ending. Oh, the ending. Maybe I'll come to a different, more enlightened conclusion after I think about it a little longer, but at the moment I can't understand why the story had to end the way it did. Specifically, why Eleanor couldn't be bothered to stay in touch with the guy who freaking drove her across state lines to help her get away from an abusive stepfather. I know she's more emotionally timid than Park, but that still doesn't explain to me how she could go from being so in love with the first boy that ever really looked at her to completely ignoring his letters and never calling. This is the type of behavior I see in shoujo manga all the time, and it drives me nuts. I can understand cutting off ties as a self-defense mechanism, but since the book barely describes any of the aftermath, I can't tell what Eleanor gained from this behavior at all.
2. Race Issues
I do have to applaud Rowell for creating two leads that are almost exotic species in YA literature. I have rarely ever come across a heroine like Eleanor who hails from an extremely poor family, and I was also duly impressed that Rowell was brave enough to write about a character with a complicated ethnic background. These facets are what made Eleanor and Park interesting people that I wanted to know more about.
However, given that I am fairly well-versed in the cultural and social issues of Asian-American identity, I think Rowell did manage to touch on important points but, overall, didn't execute Park's racial identity quite as well as I would have liked. I appreciated the part where Park points out to Eleanor that Asian men suffer negative stereotypes, and that the only Asian-American celebrity with a positive connotation is Bruce Lee. However--and maybe this is just me--I couldn't help but wonder about the fact that Park was associated so strongly to his Asian-ness throughout the book. I could understand the characters around him forgetting that he's also half Irish-American, but I couldn't quite understand how Park never brought this up at all. The book seemed to imply that Park inherited more of his mother's Asian features than his father's, but I think it would have been insightful to catch a glimpse of how Park feels about his blended looks. Because let's face it--Park is not just Asian. He is of mixed ethnicity.
Moreover, culture is different from race. There was a lot of talk about race in this book, but I hardly got any sense of culture. This hones in on one of my major issues with this book--Park's mother. Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan are painted as this wonderful true-love couple, and while those two were probably my favorite characters in the book, I felt the picture was painted too perfectly. Mrs. Sheridan had to leave behind her entire family in Korea in order to marry in the United States--specifically, in OMAHA, NEBRASKA. I've never been to Omaha, but having heard stories about my parents' graduate school years in Illinois, I can assume that there were few, if any, Asian supermarkets in the area back in the 1980s when this story takes place. I have no gripes about Park's parents still being passionately in love with each other, but I do take issue with the fact that the story glosses over how difficult it must have been for a Korean woman to immigrate to a place with hardly a trace of her native culture and homeland. And even if she had managed to replant certain elements of Korean culture into her new home, Park never mentions any Korean elements in their home, other than a line about his mother cooking liver for dinner. Again, I'm not expecting to hear about Korean traditions maintained in the Sheridan household, but in the complete absence of any mention, I would have liked at least a line or two addressing why his mother became so Americanized.
Overall: This book had a lot going for it. People have been crying out for more diversity in YA literature for years now, and I was really happy to see that this book has been receiving so much acclaim. However, I can't deny that I was disappointed in its execution--particularly with the racial/cultural issues with Park and his family.
I can't remember if I mentioned this on an earlier blog post, but one of the major changes I made with EP is an emphasized focus on the racial and cultural background of the characters. Culture was something I became very interested in during college, and it's spilled over into a lot of my work since. Aurora, Rhys, and Patrick all now have very specific ethnic backgrounds. Rhys, in particular, has changed a lot from the way I wrote him back when I was a bumbling high school student. Reading Eleanor & Park helped me gain a better sense of how I need to tackle these cultural issues adequately.
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