2025 Book #25
"Eleanor & Park" by Rainbow Rowell
Book #25: Eleanor & Park (2013) by Rainbow Rowell.
I was flying through this affecting YA novel the other day, and stopped with about 75 pages left to text my daughter – who is the reason I’ve heard of Rainbow Rowell in the first place, and indeed, one of my goals in reading this book was to feel a little closer to her while she’s living with her college roommates in Pittsburgh (but I get to visit her there tomorrow! Oh frabjous day!). I wrote her, “This book is going to break my heart, isn’t it?”
To be honest, my daughter needn’t have responded: I knew well before I sent that text that this tale of young love was not destined to end with honeysuckle and kittens’ ears.
Rowell (whose real first name is Rainbow, at least according to the FAQ on her website) established her reputation as a writer for teen readers with this novel, a well-realized two-hander that shifts perspective back and forth between its two outsider protagonists, both of whom are well-realized and identifiable.
The time is 1986; the place is Omaha (where the author is from; clearly, she knows the place intimately). Specifically, we are in The Flats, a working-class part of town, where many of the local families go back generations. Park’s father is one of those locals – Park’s grandparents live literally next door, for goodness’ sake – although his mother being Korean means that Park will always stand a little outside the norm within a pretty insular community. Park is fairly certain his father looks down on him as not measuring up to his definition of masculinity (Park’s younger brother Josh, who has the looks and build of their father, is stepping into that role much more smoothly). Park is too sensitive to be comfortable with duck hunting and such; he’s far from a jock (but he does swing a mean kick from years of taekwondo, it turns out); he is a music and comics nerd, hoping to keep his head down and survive the particularly cruel version of Darwinism that is the bus to and from school each day, lorded over by his rowdy, stereotypically overbearing peers (especially Steve, and Steve’s girlfriend Tina, the uncrowned but unquestionable king and queen of bus route political economy).
And then, one day, a new girl appears on the bus: Eleanor, an anomaly in her own right, and thus a new target for the braying cruelty of the insiders. Eleanor is a striking redhead; she’s far from petite (Eleanor’s journey to body positivity will be one of the welcome themes over the course of the book); and she dresses so far outside the norm it’s as if she’s looking for comments. (The truth is, Eleanor’s got so few clothes, and even fewer typically “girl”-coded clothes, she’s got to make the best of them somehow, and her solution is to accessorize, using a natural flair for the dramatic as a way to draw attention that she can then immediately push away so she can go back to staring out the window miserably.)
Where else is this new girl going to sit on the bus that first day – and every ride thereafter, for the rest of the 1986-87 school year – but next to Park, who knows he’ll regret it, but feels almost physical displeasure at the way this strange red-headed girl is a target in that first meeting.
Park and Eleanor thaw out over the coming weeks and months through a mechanism I found quite agreeable – Park spends his rides catching up on his comics reading, and realizes that this girl who never says anything to him is reading over his shoulder. Eventually he starts to pass some of those issues to her, and they find a shared vocabulary in discussing the comics (1986-87, I can tell you, was a helluva year for comics – Rowell makes good use of the monthly publication of the Watchmen series, which blew the doors off of what we thought comics really could be; I share Park’s incredulity that Eleanor is skipping the pirate-themed story-within-a-story, which never got translated to the big screen but added another layer to an already dense and incredible piece of literature; on the other hand, Eleanor makes good fun of Batman, and she’s kinda got a point). And then they’re on to music – Eleanor has a Smiths lyric written on her notebook, although it turns out she doesn’t actually know the song, or much of anything from their decade, having grown up with her father’s record collection, and now not having access to even that. (I’m not sure that I believed Park would know all these bands himself, but we are told that Omaha hosted numerous idiosyncratic record stores at the time, and who am I to question?)
It's a hesitant, quiet courtship at first – just the bus rides, keeping their heads down so as not to draw unwanted attention to what’s going on between them. Park is wary of social attention, but for Eleanor, there is real risk involved in this brewing relationship, which starts to dig into both of them, lodging deeply over the months that follow. Because back home, Eleanor lives with her mother and four younger siblings, in a home dominated by a stepfather, Richie, who is brutal, gross, capricious, a mean drunk (and not that great when sober). Eleanor had stood up to Richie for beating her mother: he responded by throwing her out of the house, and she’d lived in a kind of tenuous no-man’s situation for a year before her mother got Richie to relent. Eleanor hates Richie, and is rightfully scared of him. She can’t let Richie know about Park; he will destroy the relationship, maybe worse.
And that is a risk that neither Park nor Eleanor can take, because it becomes clear that everything else around them is falling away. They are living for each other – Park wants to share everything that he cares about with Eleanor, knowing her take will be incisive, ironic, smart, funny, and worth debating (one critique I’d add is that Park sure has a lot of stuff – comics, tapes, the other finer things of life – given that his family lives in The Flats; they’re half a step up the ladder economically, it would appear, but he still never seems to want for the next issue or the next album, not to mention all those cool t-shirts from bands he’s never seen live because Omaha didn’t become a locus for hip music until two decades later). Eleanor will tentatively start to let Park in on her family trauma – she has to at least make sure he understands the boundaries it’s not safe for either of them if he crosses – and Park’s home becomes a safe haven for them to spend time after school, even though Park’s parents are usually around and there are real limitations as they start to feel the itch to explore each other in all the messy, sticky, beautiful ways that are the stuff of young love.
Of the two, Eleanor is the slightly more effectively-drawn character (I wonder to what extent Rowell isn’t just fictionalizing with Eleanor’s character traits, but it’s really none of my business). Park’s arc is largely about how much he wants to dive right into this love he’s feeling for a girl who’s unsettled him from the first time he saw her wobbling to find a place to sit as the school bus accelerated away from her bus stop. His parents are uneasy with this girl who’s not like anything they ever imagined for their son, but eventually his mother comes around, realizing that Eleanor needs the stability that they can offer, and even Park’s macho father manages to get past his negative reaction to his son’s experimentations with some of the possibilities for a kid who’s looking up to Robert Smith, among other 80s style icons. (When the major crisis moment for the couple comes late in the book, Park’s dad steps up big time, and I was pretty well wrecked for a few pages there.)
Push is going to come to shove: it’s inevitable, and not just because this is a work of fiction with an author who needs to bring plot threads to a climax and then resolution. The course of teenage love is ne’er smooth; rare is the teen relationship that lasts more than a few months (that I know not one but two couples from back home who got together in high school and are still together, happily married with kids of their own, decades later, feels like the stuff of fiction when I mention them to my students). And there is the rising tension of Eleanor’s home situation, the hackle-raising threat every time she can’t evade Richie’s glares, stinging words, or worse. We know from page one that Park is looking back with sorrow; what we don’t know is what, exactly, he’s mourning. When it comes, it comes with a punch in the gut.
So, yes, I guess you could say that this book broke my heart. But that’s not always a bad thing.