I just read the last third of this book in under 2 hours. Compared to the 2 months it took to read the first two thirds, this is testament to the fact that once you really get into a book this good, you just can't put it down.
When I started reading Perks, I thought I was going to dislike it for the same reason I disliked The Catcher in the Rye: its about a teenager moaning endlessly about his problems that aren't really problems and not getting over himself. However, I was proved wrong. The protagonist Charlie has mature, real reactions to what happens to him. He even addresses towards the end of the book that some of his problems are insignificant compared to that of others (ironically, this happens when we discover some genuinely terrible truths about his past), and says that he understands this, but that it is okay to feel sad even when others are worse off. There's nothing wrong with feeling. Whilst it is filled with a lot of sadness, it's an incredibly life-affirming novel. Like The Fault in Our Stars, which I will have to write something on, it manages to be sad, funny, and optimistic all at the same time.
The concept of having the novel written in a series of letters was interesting. You really feel like Charlie is genuinely opening up to someone, even though you know that both him and the reader of the letter are fictional. An interesting concept, which I initially thought was a gimmick but became quite poignant.
I think this says something about how positive reading a boo like this can be:
When I started my marathon of reading the last third of the novel, I had just seen that outside it was snowing in late March. I was annoyed. That shouldn't be a thing. When I finished the novel, I looked outside, and perhaps I had just gotten used to the idea of snow in March, but this time it looked really beautiful. It became a positive thing, and the only thing that changed was that I had read this incredibly positive and profoundly optimistic novel about how its okay to feel things and live in the moment and feel infinite.
No, it's not high literature. It's teen fiction. I don't know whether it will find it's way into the canon of literature eventually, but I enjoyed it much more than other 'better' works about alienated teenagers like The Catcher in the Rye or The Buddha of Suburbia. Perks made me feel so much more than they did, and that's surely what it's all about?
Note. I wrote this in virtually one go, an hour after finishing reading, and I feel it has the honesty of Charlie in Perks. Even my writing style has been influenced by this novel
