Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Release Date: October 18th, 2010

Publisher: Razorbill

Age Group: Young Adult

Pages: 288

Buy This Book: Amazon

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All Clay Jensen is is an average guy who's never done anything wrong in his life. So when on one ordinary day he finds a package sitting on his doorstep, he doesn't expect a set of thirteen tapes detailing the death of Hannah Baker: a girl who had performed suicide just a few† weeks before. With Hannah herself as the narrator, she tells the story of her life, and the thirteen people who led the chain of events that eventually destroyed it. What Clay is about to discover is something monumentally haunting....and something that will change his life forever, no matter the cost.
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Wow. That was all I said, as I lay near my San Franciscan hotel room ceiling-to-floor window, and stared down into the buzz below. Hundreds of people seemed to pass the streets that day, and the rain drizzled down in gray flecks that dotted their umbrellas and souls. Who was the next person that would fall into a fate like Hannah's? Out of all those ordinary looking people down there, who had a secret burning a hole right through their hearts, spinning wildly out of control? 

That's what I felt like when I finished the last word of Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why. It felt like my life had suddenly been thrown onto a different course and left for something I'd never intentioned. When I first saw this book at a nearby Borders, I was like, meh. Seriously, I said that (at least in my head). It was the paperback version, and though I still had doubts, the gray coloring drew me more than the sunlight shining on the girl swinging, staring off into the distance. This one seemed more...ominous, like secrets danced just under the surface that were waiting to be found out. 

And found out they were. I still don't understand this book completely-the plot tossed you around like a small boat in the ocean, and all I could was grasp to the side and hang on for dear life. I've read about death before. But this one was more intense, real, and raw than any other death I have even read about before. When I finished, I cried, knowing that Hannah was gone forever. I never, ever cry-at least, I try not to-but this one was the first book where I wasn't ever going to hold them in. 

I feel heavy, weighed with knowledge like never before. Thirteen Reasons Why will stay with me for the rest of my life, and it has inspired me to try to be something good and kind-something that would've saved Hannah Baker's life, in time.