A Short Reflection on The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I'm a sucker for reading books just before I see the movie (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hunger Games, etc.) and the same is true for The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

This book never made it to my high school English class reading list. Yet I enjoyed its offbeat Young Adult-ness. The amount of sex and drugs was surprising for the age of its targeted audience but I suppose that's not a new thing in a time where honesty trumps most everything else.

I would perhaps describe it as a high school version of Garden State's coming-of-age and calls for a responsibility over one's actions similar to East of Eden, although slightly more humanistic. And I would deem this description a positive review.

In the epilogue, the protagonist (/narrator/letter writer) sums up the whole thing rather nicely:

So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them. 

Check it if you're into that sort of thing.