As of 2017, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. Every year, almost 45,000 people commit suicide, and annually, suicide costs the US about $51 billion. But, aside from all the statistics, aside from the money aspect, those 45,000 victims, are people, with families, friends and lives, and that’s what people seem to forget.
Attempting to understand how devastating a suicide can be, without actually experiencing one, can be hard, but, readers are in luck because, there is a new book and movie series (on Netflix) called Thirteen Reasons Why, a true story of Hannah Baker a young girl who killed herself in the early 90’s. Now… this may seem like just another documentary or sci-fi book about someone’s suicide story, but it goes far deeper than that. Within the true story of Hannah Baker, comes a mystery, and an ending of despair and jail time. The book is a cross between what life is like for friends and family of Hannah, after her death, and in a stranger series of events, somehow, Hannah left a collection of tapes filmed by herself, expressing why she killed herself and whose fault it is. But, the story gets even more twisted, within all the tapes Hannah created, are secrets, dark tragic secrets that happened to her a month before she killed herself. These secrets incriminate her own friends, family, and even, the love of her life, Clay Jensen. “You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.” ― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why (GoodReads) .
My personal opinion on the book and movie Thirteen Reasons Why (because I’ve read & seen both) is that I think the main idea of the story is very powerful. Suicide is not something people can choose to ignore until someone close to them does it, suicide needs to be something everyone thinks about & is cautious about. Becoming a victim, or a grieving friend or family member can happen to anybody in such a short amount of time, and everybody needs to know it isn’t a joke! People really do kill themselves everyday, and people really do go to jail for intentionally or unintentionally causing someone to kill themselves. I believe my opinion of this book compared to other critics is very similar in the fact that almost everyone who has read this book, or heard Hannah Baker’s story, agrees that this needs to be published for everyone to see so that maybe the world can start to grasp the fact that suicide is not a joke. How many more victims does 2017, 18, or so on, need to take for the world to realize bullying, suicide, depression, etc is no joke! It deserves recognition, and suicide should be a real prosecutable crime. I know this to be true because, Common Sense Media says the same, “There are positive messages here about the importance of treating people with kindness -- and about the price of inaction -- that parents and teachers may want to help teen readers think and talk about” (CommonSenseMedia) . In addition, I feel the writer’s style in this book, is very metaphorical. I feel it has to be written this way because Hannah is already gone… so it can not be in present time or even a biography of her life. The author also incorporated the use of, foreshadowing, by including many recurring elements in Hannah’s story, illusions, imagery, and parallelism by showing the parallels Clay, Hannah’s boyfriend finds between him and Hannah.
I would recommend this book to anyone in highschool, whether girl or boy, and I’d recommend this book to any parent who has a teenager that is struggling with depression, or not fitting in, or feeling like an outcast. This book contains a lot of good coping mechanisms, and teaches its readers how to look for the red warning signs of someone who is suicidal. Hopefully, with this book and the new series on Netflix becoming more and more popular, more people will realize that suicide is serious and it could just take five seconds out of your day, saying hi to someone, to save someone and make them smile & feel accepted. This book I feel, was intended to appeal to high schoolers, which I feel it achieved because even personally, right after the book & movie released, I saw it all over my Twitter timeline. Thirteen Reasons Why was all my highschool friends could talk about, so I decided to give it a try. This book appeals to high school students because it deals with Hannah Baker, a young American girl in highschool, dealing with drama, depression, bullying, and every other unfortunately, normal aspect of high school. This helps appeal to teenagers all over the US because it reminds them that they are not alone, although what happened to Hannah was very tragic, her story is incredibly inspiring because it gives hope to many other teens going through the same thing that they aren’t alone in this battle. Although Hannah lost to her depression, it is an important lesson to others that they too, don’t have to take their lives because of depression and bullying. The reasons for conflict to rise in this book is because, her family, friends & boyfriend are dealing with the pain of losing Hannah, when suddenly, these tapes, with Hannah Baker talking on them, start circulating around…but only to selective people who were one of the reasons Hannah killed herself. So, with that being said, whoever got the tapes, knew they were one of the causes to Hannah’s death. It caused anxiety, fear of going to jail, and sadness through the characters, book and projects those feelings to the reader as well. To me, one of the most important quotes in this book is, “I wrote a note to Mrs. Bradley that read: "Suicide. It's something I've been thinking about. Not too seriously, but I have been thinking about it" (9.201) . I feel this quote is very important because it shows that Hannah tried to reach out to her teacher by writing her a note, but her teacher unfortunately didn’t take the note seriously enough because a week later Hannah was gone. This is an important yet tragic lesson in this book that suicide is something you need to act fast on, if someone is giving a cry out for help, please don’t ignore that cry for help, help them, listen to them, hug them, maybe if her teacher had done that she wouldn’t be gone today. But, like many others, Hannah is now an important story in our history, of how hard it can be to be a teenager. I urge anyone and everyone to read this book and hear Hannah’s story because then maybe we can reduce those 45,000 victims that 2018 will claim, to zero.
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Grabbed me after the first few pages!
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2018
This book… oh where to start! Thirteen Reasons Why had my attention from the get-go and I found it hard to put down, mostly because Clay seemed so sweet that I just NEEDED to know what the heck he could have possibly done to be on the tapes. (No spoilers below, so feel free to read on, though I am not sure my opinion will be a popular one!)It was heart wrenching at times to hear how each of the people played a part in Hannah taking her life. High school is hard for a lot of people, it was for me too, and I know that situations during that time can feel like they are life or death type of things… it’s oh so dramatic.That being said, I did not relate to Hannah or feel bad for her in most parts of the book. I think we have all gone through tough times and while she didn’t always get the luckiest break, she did absolutely nothing to stand up for herself – and we were supposed to sympathize and feel bad for her? I don’t think so. I think she brought a bunch of the “reasons” on to herself and I couldn’t relate or see why she didn’t speak up when she had the opportunity a few times even. That didn’t stop me from flying through the pages though, but once I finished Clay’s tape, I definitely lost interest, but kept going to find out how things ended up.Also, I tried to watch the show afterwards and it was TERRIBLE. People have been raving about it and I had to force myself to sit through episodes and I have yet to finish the series. It’s way too drawn out and melodramatic… I just can’t.I am giving it 3.5 cupcakes, since it held my attention, even though Hannah annoyed me. I mostly tried to focus on Clay and the stories that were told.
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2018
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 1, 2017
13 Reasons Why: An Explosive, Novel Twist on the Tired Topic of Teen Suicide—Not a Book for Everyone
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 22, 2017Top reviews from other countries
Fifi
Hard to not draw comparisons with its TV adaption
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 31, 2018H
“No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people.”
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 2, 2022sheryl
Everything affects everything
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 3, 2019
Sumedha
I could probably give you more than 13 reasons as to why I didn't like this book.
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on May 30, 2019
Sumedha
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on May 30, 2019
It follows this girl, Hannah who commits suicide on the basis of "thirteen reasons" which are co related to each other and thinks that it's justified to make tapes regarding said reasons.
1. The person listed in the tape would go down this guilt trip which will alter THEIR mental health.
2. The reasons, alone, were really small things that people wouldn't really have noticed.
3. Putting blame on teenagers for these reasons could actually provide as a really big reason for them.
Even though this book is dealing with "depression", the actual word wasn't once mentioned in the book. Not once.
Moreover, it didn't make sense that a person who's mentally exhausted and numb to things around would ploy this mastermind to have these tapes delivered to the people AND to make sure that they listened to it. Sounds something like revenge, doesn't it?
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