'Eleanor & Park' by Rainbow Rowell

Rowell, Rainbow. Eleanor & Park. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013.

Photo by: L. Propes

You could pick Eleanor and Park off the pages of this book and drop them into a John Hughes movie or an Amy Sherman-Palladino television series.  They certainly wouldn’t be out of place among the misfits of The Breakfast Club or Pretty In Pink or the rapid-fire, pop-culture laden dialog of Gilmore Girls or Bunheads.  While the idea of two teenaged misfits finding each other and falling in love seems like it’s been done a million times before, Rainbow Rowell makes Eleanor& Park seem fresh and new, and it lies in the way her two titular characters are able to expose their vulnerabilities to one another without descending into a sea of cynicism and snark. 

Eleanor & Park begins in August 1986 and follows the tentative beginnings of Eleanor and Park’s burgeoning friendship that blossoms gradually into love.  They “don’t meet cute; they meet vexed” (“Eleanor & Park” Kirkus).  Eleanor is the new girl in their Omaha school. She’s zaftig, tall, with lots of curly red hair.  Her wardrobe choices make her look like she’s wearing a Halloween costume, and she has nowhere to sit on the bus.  Park is the half-Korean, punk and New Wave-loving, comic-book-reading outsider who grudgingly lets Eleanor sit next to him on the bus.  Park realizes Eleanor is reading his comic books over his shoulder and the foundations of their friendship are formed on the wordless bus rides to and from school, bonding over X-Men.  Eventually, Park begins to lend Eleanor his comic books (still without saying a word), and after weeks of silently trading comics, he breaks the ice by asking about the song titles Eleanor has written on the covers of her textbooks.  (Just so you know Rowell isn’t condoning vandalism, Eleanor has made protective covers for her textbooks using brown paper grocery bags.  That’s what she’s doodled on, not the actual book cover.) 

Eleanor and Park couldn’t be more different from one another on the surface.  Eleanor’s parents are divorced, and she hardly sees her father.  Her mother is married to a man who mentally and physically abuses her and makes life miserable for Eleanor and her four siblings.  In fact, Richie, Eleanor’s stepfather, kicked Eleanor out of the house for a year, and when the novel begins, has just “allowed” her to move back in with the family. The family is so poor they can’t afford things like toothpaste or regular shampoo, and Eleanor shares a room with her younger sister and three younger brothers.  Eleanor’s mother has expressly forbidden her to date or have contact with boys outside of school. It’s unclear if this is her mother’s wish, or if it’s something she’s done to appease Richie.  Eleanor is also deeply insecure about many things -- her weight, her appearance, and even her worthiness to be with a person she feels is as decent as Park.  She hides her insecurities under a cool and collected façade, but every so often a bullying incident creates a fissure and allows the anxieties to show.  She has a sharp wit and original insight of literature, even going so far as to challenge the entrenched opinion of Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy, viewing it as a satiric look at love (Rowell 44). 

Park’s parents are happily married, and are openly demonstrative with one another in front of Park and his younger brother.  Their house is always neat and tidy, and unlike Eleanor, Park isn’t worried about where his next meal will come from.  His mother is a beautician and sells Avon. Park thinks that she would be the most popular girl on the school bus (Rowell 118).  Park can have a difficult relationship with his father, mostly due to their clashing personalities and differing ideas about what it means to be a man, but it’s obvious that Park’s father loves and cares about him.  Park’s family life, which also includes his paternal grandparents who live next-door, is stable and solidly middle-class.  Park’s mother doesn’t want Park to have a girlfriend so he can focus on his studies, but accepts that Park is seeing Eleanor.  Park’s willingness to push the envelope of typical masculine behavior (like wearing black eyeliner to school) frustrates and bemuses his father.  Park tends to engage in low-level passive-aggressive behavior to display his rejection of the image of a stereotypical All-American Midwestern teenager that his father wants him to have.  Park isn’t a saint, though.  He’s plagued by his own insecurities about his ethnic heritage and his low social status in the neighborhood.  Sometimes, his insecurities come out in full force, and unfortunately, their target is sometimes Eleanor.  After an argument with Eleanor regarding Park’s previous (and long-ago) relationship with her nemesis Tina, Park admits to himself a part of him “didn’t want Tina to get over him” (Rowell 178).  As much as Park wants to project to the world that he doesn’t care what they think of him, as demonstrated by dating Eleanor, he admits to himself it does matter because “he [keeps] finding new pockets of shallow inside himself.  He [keeps] finding new ways to betray her” (Rowell 178). 

Throughout the year, Eleanor is haunted by small incidents of bullying, including filthy messages scrawled on the covers of her textbooks.  She comes to a horrifying realization about the author of the notes and must make a decision to stay in Omaha or run away to see if her uncle in St. Paul, Minnesota will offer her sanctuary. 

Rowell sets up the novel with a framing device, that’s almost repeated verbatim at the end, written in Park’s voice.  She alternates the rest of the narrative between Eleanor and Park, sometimes switching voices to give the reader their individual reactions to the same event.  When she switches between Park and Eleanor’s respective narration, Rowell notes it with a heading that simply says “Park” or “Eleanor”.   I found both of their voices to be quite distinct from one another.  Park, for example, has a much more lyrical voice.  The first time he holds her hand, he says, “Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly.  Or a heartbeat.  Like holding something complete, and completely alive” (Rowell 71).  Eleanor, on the other hand describes it this way: “Disintegrated.  Like something had gone wrong beaming her onto the Starship Enterprise.  If you’ve ever wondered what that feels like, it’s a lot like melting -- but more violent” (Rowell 72).  Eleanor’s voice has its own poetry, but she is much more straightforward about what she thinks, keeping her more intimate emotions tightly under wraps.  She often adds parenthetical comments to her own inner monologue. 

Their relationship is “chaste first love, authentic in its awkwardness -- full of insecurities, miscommunications, and sexual awakenings -- and life-changing for them” (Ritter 93).  The relationship, as viewed through the prism of their words is -- and there’s no other word for it -- intense.  This intensity, which a reader can feel from the first moment Park slips his fingers through Eleanor’s, shines through in their inner thoughts, and sometimes in their dialog with each other.  During a rare telephone conversation, Eleanor tells Park, “I don’t like you, Park,” she said, sounding for a second like she actually meant it.  “I…” -- her voice nearly disappeared -- “think I live for you” (Rowell 111).  Taken out of context, this could be the corniest bit of dialog ever written, but when placed within the backdrop of Eleanor’s chaotic home life and marginalized position inside her own family; it works and sounds nothing but natural coming out of Eleanor’s mouth.  The emotional flights of fancy the narrative takes are mostly in the inner monologues of the characters, so when they do utter a whimsical phrase, it feels organic, as if Eleanor or Park have loosened their Vulcan death grip on their own feelings.  Of course, exchanges like this also bring to light the question of whether or not Eleanor’s feelings for Park are genuine or whether she’s subconsciously using him to escape her family. 

The dialog between Eleanor and Park also reveal their wry sense of humor, especially during a discussion when Eleanor compares Cyclops from X-Men to Batman, stating how boring they both are.  When Park protests and tells her he’s going to loan her his copy of The Dark Knight Returns, he says it’s “Only the least boring Batman story ever” (Rowell 60).  Eleanor retorts, “The least boring Batman story ever, huh?  Does Batman raise both eyebrows?” (Rowell 60). 

Park’s parents -- Jamie and Min-Dae “Mindy” Sheridan -- aren’t relegated to the background of the novel.  They play an active role in the story and experience just as much growth and character development as Park and Eleanor.  In his review of the novel for the New York Times, John Green (yes, that John Green) calls Park’s parents “two of the best-drawn adults I can remember in a young adult novel” (“Two Against the World”).  Park’s father wants Park to be the kind of Midwestern man with which Mr. Sheridan is most familiar -- tough and brawny.  Oh, and able to drive a stick shift.  It’s clear Mr. Sheridan’s respect grows for Park and the way he quietly stands up for Eleanor, willing to do what it takes to protect her.  It’s Mrs. Sheridan who displays the most development out of the two.  She’s not fond of Eleanor when they first meet, but a chance glimpse of Eleanor with her mother and siblings at the grocery store on Christmas Eve reveals to Mrs. Sheridan the level of Eleanor’s struggles, and makes her realize she has more in common with Eleanor than at first glance.  Mrs. Sheridan met Mr. Sheridan when he was serving in Korea in the late 1960s.  They married in Seoul, South Korea, and Mrs. Sheridan proceeded to leave everything she knew behind.  Park mentions how she never talks about her life in Korea, but on Christmas Eve, Mrs. Sheridan recognizes the poverty and hunger behind the nervous and uncertain front Eleanor presents in the Sheridans’ home.  Coming from such dire straits, the Sheridan house might as well be a foreign country to Eleanor. 

I feel Rowell’s inclusion of a discussion of Romeo and Juliet isn’t an accident.  Park remarks that the play reminds “people… what it’s like to be young… and in love” (Rowell 45).  In her blog “Monkey See”, NPR correspondent Linda Holmes comments that for Park and Eleanor, who “feel lost -- because of bullying, because of abuse, because of race… being loved makes them feel less lost” (“True Love”).  Rowell doesn’t shy away from the harrowing abuse Richie hurls at Eleanor or the rest of her family.  Holmes, in particular praises Rowell for this saying, “Ugliness -- honesty about ugliness -- is important, because it gives shape and meaning to some important stories about not allowing it to swamp you” (“True Love").  In an interview with the online magazine The Toast, Rowell responds to people who feel her book should be banned because of its unflinching content.  She says, “When these people call Eleanor & Park an obscene story, I feel like they’re saying that rising above your situation isn’t possible.  That if you grow up in an ugly situation, your story isn’t even fit for good people’s ears.  That ugly things cancel out everything beautiful” (Ortberg “A Chat With Rainbow Rowell”).  Spending most of my teaching career working with kids who weren’t very different from Eleanor or Park, this is the kind of book they need to read, if for no other reason than to find out that there are people like them, who have found a way to survive their situation. 

Rowell is also the author of Fangirl, Landline, and Attachments. Eleanor & Park is a 2014 Printz Honor book. 

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Works Cited 

"Eleanor & Park." Kirkus Reviews 80.24 (2012): 149-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 June 2014.

Green, John. "Two Against the World." The New York Times, sec. Sunday Book Review: BR17. March 8 2013. Print.

Holmes, Linda. "True Love, Book Fights, and Why Ugly Stories Matter." Monkey See. September 18 2013.Web. 22 June 2014. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/09/18/223738674/true-love-book-fights-and-why-ugly-stories-matter>.

Ortberg, Mallory. "A Chat With Rainbow Rowell About Love and Censorship." The Toast. September 17 2013.Web. 22 June 2014. <http://the-toast.net/2013/09/17/chat-rainbow-rowell-love-censorship/>.

Ritter, Cynthia K. "Eleanor & Park." Horn Book Magazine 89.3 (2013): 93-4. Education Source. Web. 22 June 2014.

Rowell, Rainbow.  Eleanor & Park. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013. Print.