Thirteen Reasons Why: I expected more..

 

While it is true it was emotionally difficult to get through some passages of this Jay Asher novel, I hoped for an emergent differentiation in the decade old morality tale. What I got was the same old story I have read before with a thin veneer of gimmicky innovation and some straight talk on personal responsibility.

I have read a number of teen scare books over the years teaching lessons each time about drugs, cutting, the occult, etc. All of them follow the same formula. Whether Suicide, overdose, murder, demonic influence (and more), they all end the same, with untimely death.

Normally, these books/journals/etc also pat the reader on the back as a person who ‘will know better now’ and avoid the traps of the core topic. 13 Rrasons went so far as to include a person who did nothing wrong and would take the pat in the back for me. Instead of interacting with the object of evidence directly, we had a proxy to absorb some of the shock and repetitiously give commentary that undermined the storyteller.

The election to use tapes instead of paper is never explained from a character perspective. She just seems to randomly attach to the idea and make her listeners squirm in a technology they are unfamiliar with and do not have ready access to.

The result of formulic writing rarely/never changes. This is a great book, but besides gimmick, it is more of the same. Changing the flavor of CocaCola just results in failure and Coke Classic.. So why should I have expected them to change Coke? Just consume it and don’t put much thought into it.