A Review- The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is a dramatic novel set in the USA at the end of the 1990's, written beautifully by Stephen Chbosky. It tells the story of Charlie, a teenager who's been through clinical depression related to traumatic events in his life since his childhood. Charlie is a shy and mentally disturbed freshman at school and does not fit in to any group, his only friend is his English teacher until he meets two seniors: Sam and Patrick, half siblings that don't fit in to regular groups as well and that have as many problems as Charlie.

This is not a simple cliché teenage story. The characters are disturbed teenagers dealing with all sorts of harsh situations, like depression, self-harm, bullying, abuse, sexuality, violence and suicide. They need to deal with these issues, which most of the time they try to do without telling anyone and needing to be self-sufficient at this young age. The book is written in letters to an unknown person, because Charlie's therapist told him that it was going to help him get through his problems and that makes the story addictive because the reader feels the need to discover who the person he's writing to is and what happened to him when he was younger.

The book was adapted to a movie directed by the same person who wrote it. That way, the movie and the book complement each other, which means that to fully understand the book, the reader needs to watch the amazing adaptation and then everything can fit into the gaps left by the writer, probably on purpose.

It is not hard to identify with one of the characters from the book, since the descriptions are vivid and the characters seem like real people experiencing real problems from life. With the famous quotation: "We accept the love we think we deserve", the conversation about self-love and abusive relationships runs through the book. The way the scenes and Charlie's feelings are shaped into the story make the reader feel like they are by Charlie's side while he is writing the letters explaining what happened to him and trying to understand it himself.

I recommended this book to every single person who's looking for a real plot and far-from-being-perfect characters, people who make mistakes and are human just like us and that are confused, misunderstood, looking for approval and, mainly, looking for love. This novel is unlike any other novel you will ever read in your entire life and is purely beautiful, tense, anxious and wonderful, all at once. Sometimes the awesomeness of the experience of reading this book cannot be explained in words, you simply need to read it to understand it.