13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher Review

Title: Thirteen Reasons Why

Author: Jay Asher

Release Date: October 18th, 2007

My Rating: 4 Stars

Format: Physical Book (Paperback)

I admit I watched the Netflix show first and when reading the book I was always comparing.

This story shows depression, suicide and rape and I feel like these themes are very important themes to be in a book, for people to know how the ones they hurt might feel. I bet you had a school experience with bullying and that hurt you, I know I did, and the ones that bully never know how hurtful is for the one who is getting those awful words. Hopefully, this book will make people think more about what they do.

This book is only about why Hannah killed herself, but what about the rest of the world? Her parents? Clay didn’t have a big reaction, or at least I didn’t feel that and in the TV show they showed more about what her parents were feeling like after losing their daughter, and Clay reacted way more, and all the other around too, the series shows how everyone else reacted to her death and to the tapes.

Another thing is the order, in the book is different but I feel like in the tv show is more reasonable, everyone else already watched the tapes and only 2 people left, and after hearing them Clay does something meaningful, whilst in the book, not everyone has listened, he’s not number 11, so he just passes on the tapes.

In the show the character Jeff was more important than “a student in my school has died in an accident”, they made you feel for him, I cried with his death in the TV show, but in the book he’s just not important, he doesn’t even have a name.

In the show, Clay takes a long time to finish listening to the tapes because it’s something with heavy subjects, of course, you can’t listen in one night, but in the book he did and I don’t know how since he loved her, I felt like the show had more sense in that.

But yeah, overall I really liked the book but I loved the show even more so hence the 4 stars instead of 5 (also because I didn’t like the writing style very much).