Strong Opinions on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

I would like to start off by saying Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was in no way a bad book. I just didn't really like it. I think this review says more about me than the book itself.

MEDY follows a high school senior named Greg: he's forced into the situation of comforting his ex girlfriend who has leukemia. However, the  main conflict of the novel is not that this girl, whom he forms an unlikely friendship with, has cancer, but that he is, in fact, an asshole. Greg S. Gaines doesn't understand life (or death) one bit.

 The book starts off with Greg breaking the fourth wall. He did this copious times in the book--a stylistic choice of Jesse Andrews that I wasn't very fond of. It felt like a cop-out, like Greg's informal tone was a joke to such a heavy-topic book. But then again, the entire book felt like a joke.

I at least expected Greg to prove us wrong and have a change of heart in the end. Which he sort of did, but he was still an jerk. Greg never appreciated his family, his friends, or Rachel. It took seeing Rachel on her deathbed for Greg to realize she was dying. I was unimpressed by his childlike behavior toward the whole situation, and silently appreciated Earl in my head when he beat him up in one of the final scenes.

I can't articulate how much it gets on my nerves that there was no point for this book. Greg doesn't take anything away from Rachel's death. The point of a story is growth and development, but there is little of that in this book. At times, it seemed to contradict itself, and Greg's story was incredibly jumbled. It felt like I was reading one of his films--it skipped around all the time, the characters were obnoxiously ungrateful and flat, and there truly was no plot. If this was Andrews' intention, then well done. But I felt like his novel was trying to be something it was not--witty and intelligent, but it felt abrasive and offensive.

The only thing preventing me from giving this book 1 star was the humor and the fact that it was a nice, fast paced read. But I still couldn't get into it, or connect with any of the characters.

Overall, I gave this book two stars. It had a lot of potential, and it was really funny in some parts, but I don't really understand the hype surrounding it. The best thing going for it was the relaxed contemporary style of the book (written in texts and script format), but the lackluster characters were unappealing to me throughout. Still, I'm interested in seeing the movie, hoping that it would fix my many problems with this book. Unfortunately, it was an underwhelming first read for the new year.

The 5-Star System

There are so many reasons rating books is hard.

The comparison exists to make some books stand apart from the rest. I love the idea of having some favorites, some least favorites, and some in between books that leave no significant impression on you.

But what, exactly, are we comparing these books to?

In some ways, the 5-star system is rating books among genres. But because same system is used to rate books in historical fiction and fantasy, the historical fiction that I read would always have less stars. I find this frustrating because I like fantasy infinitely more than historical fiction, but I don't want to grade a good historical fiction down on the fact that it was historical fiction.

The star system is also used to compare books by a singular author. But if there's an author I love who has written books I love, I start running out of stars to differentiate the ways in which I liked the books. Perhaps one's plot was on par, and another had good characters, and yet another had a good message. Nothing is done to contrast the meaning behind the 5 stars I've given each.

Or perhaps the book is just being compared to itself. When rating books, this is the only way I can stand to do it. Does it have a good plot? Writing style? Likable characters? All of these things contribute to whether or not I like something.

But until I can explain my rating in words, the star system seems insufficient in doing what I'm trying to accomplish.

I use the 5-star system because it's universal. Goodreads uses it, and everyone understands the scale of "terrible" to "amazing." And I'm lazy, so I rarely write out my own reviews.

Despite my lack of motivation to write reviews, I still get angry whenever I think of the 5-star system. Maybe I should start rating books based on multiple categories. Maybe I'll come up with my own system sometime.