Thirteen Reasons Why

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher, 304 pages

This was a popular book at a previous place I worked for awhile, and when I read the description, I was intrigued.  The idea is that a high school girl kills herself, but sends a recording out to the main character of the book (and others) explaining how they helped lead her to her suicide.  I found this book to be flawed and somewhat troubling.  First of all, the main character turns out to not have been one of the 13 reasons why the girl killed herself- he's the one who was so good to her that she just wants to tell him she's sorry they didn't work out.  Insert massive eye roll here.  I think the book is coming from a good place- every news story about young people being raped while passed out or bullied into suicide breaks my heart.  It should be the stuff of a melodramatic teen book, but it's not- it's real life.  And I guess that's one of the things I found sort of troubling here- it feels like the girl's message (which the author does not contradict) was "I'm hurting and I want to die, so I'm going to make you hurt, too, because you should know that you helped do this to me," which is such a sad, selfish message to leave the survivors of a person's suicide. Some of the kids in this book do awful things, but by and large, most of them are just dumb kids.  They don't know any better.  This just really rubbed me the wrong way- but maybe I'm expecting too much.