Once Upon a Bookshelf

Two weeks after Hannah commits suicide, Clay receives a box without a return address and only containing 7 cassette tapes in the mail. What Clay soon discovers is that these tapes were made by Hannah right before she killed herself in order to tell the thirteen reasons why she did it. The tapes have been making their way around to the people who have had some impact on Hannah’s life – and mostly not in a good way. The ones who started her in the direction that she’s going in, the ones who compounded what she was doing, the ones who did nothing to help.

Started this book the other evening, and stayed up way too late in order to finish it. I don’t normally read a whole book in one evening, but in this case I just couldn’t put it down. Drew me in right from the beginning. It was a positively heart-wrenching book; brilliant; so sad and yet somehow so filled with hope. The way that I could feel both Hannah’s and Clay’s pain, and see the way their characters changed throughout the book (even though Clay listening to the tapes took place over just one night) was fabulous. Seeing Hannah through Clay’s eyes, yet hearing her story through the tapes that Clay is listening to, created so much depth to Hannah – you saw how she saw herself, and how others saw her and these were both so different that it was at times hard to relate one person to the other. It definitely showed how one persons perception can be so different than another persons. It showed how one person’s life can get out of control so quickly, can change so quickly, and can snowball to the point where that person no longer has control over his/her own life.

This book also has a great message to not be afraid to act if you think something is wrong with a friend, and to look at what the consequences of your actions might be. So many things in this book could have been prevented so easily, but because no one acted and just let things snowball, well…

Fabulous book. I highly recommend it, and while it’s a YA book, I think that everyone could get something out of it. The story itself is going to be sticking with me for a very long time.