Rating: ⭐️⭐️
Trigger Warnings: Suicide/Death, Rape, Harassment, and Bullying.
“You can’t stop the future.
You can’t rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.
Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why.
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.”
Okay, this is going to get controversial. I didn’t like this book and really struggled with it. I wanted to dnf it, but stuck with it for the readathon I’m in and this is for the banned book prompt. This was a bit triggering for me too. I’m going to list my mental health disorders real quick. I have bipolar 2 disorder, anxiety, and adhd. With my bipolar disorder I spend more time depressed than hypomanic and I don’t get so depressed that I can’t get out of bed or do hygiene. It’s just I don’t like myself, I struggle with liking things, struggle with focus, I’m not happy, I hate myself, and just hate life and I do a lot of times have those dark thoughts, so I know where Hannah is coming from and I know that deep pain that feels like it is swallowing you up and where you don’t want to exist anymore. You feel like know one is there for you and you’re hopeless. I get that. However, I personally feel like and this is what annoyed me with the book as well as not liking it is that I feel like someone who feels that darkness is not going to sit and record tapes. It’s going to take hours to do that. Maybe I’m wrong. I never got to the part where I planned things thankfully. I would just think you would end all and maybe leave a quick note. Then, I just feel like the tapes are horrible because it is bullying back and making people feel terrible about themselves. What they did is wrong, don’t get me wrong, but could it lead to ending themselves too? I just could see a sequence of that happening. I don’t know. I just have struggled with this authors work before too and I struggled with the show as well. The one thing I do like is that this book could get people to talk about mental health and break the stigma about it and about getting help.
