Although I must have heard of The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, I hadn’t read it before now. The coming of age novel came out in 1999, a dozen years after I graduated from high school, which explains why it wasn’t on my radar at the time. It was brought to my attention by a book I read in December of 2024 called The Book Swap. The two main characters in that book shared a history of loving Perks during their high school years, which intrigued me enough to put it on my TBR.
I really enjoyed this book, although I’m not sure if enjoyed is the right word when it deals with so many heavy issues. The story is told through a series of letters that Charlie, the main character, is writing to a friend. We don’t know the identity or location of this friend, but the use of the epistolary style is very effective in allowing us to learn from Charlie’s point of view what is happening and how he feels about it.
I was leaning towards giving this four stars, but then it made me cry. That is very rare for me and made me realize how invested I had become in Charlie’s story, which bumped it up to five stars. Now that I have read the book, I want to watch the movie, which came out in 2012 and was written and directed by Chbosky.
In So Many Words 