To be perfectly honest, I’ve been holding off on reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower for a while. The reason was that I found the first few pages virtually unreadable. The prose was too stiff, too rigid to navigate the passage smoothly. I get that the author was trying to initiate a “growth” in our main character Charlie’s writing, but it was still an uncomfortable read to the very end.
It’s clear that Charlie is just a wallflower–but even then, it felt off when the book grazed through serious issues such as drug use, domestic abuse, and rape without truly focusing on any of them. Throughout the book, the narrative just felt largely detached. If Charlie did feel something about whatever happened, it was described through elementary words such as “sad” and “worry”–and that was all there was to it. And he didn’t only feel detached through emotions, either. The “teen” narrative felt too forced at times, especially since Charlie is not aware of anything at all. He fails to understand social situations and, at 15, didn’t even understand what masturbation was. For the intelligent, and gifted student that he supposedly was, he lacked an awful lot decision-making skills and awareness. This even got to the point where theres online debates on whether Charlie is autistic or not.
All in all, this book lacked the writing style and the smooth narrative to actually make sense why things happened the way they did.
~2 stars
