Title: Eleanor & Park
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance, Young Adult
Spice: 1 / 5
Format: Audio
Pages: 328
Length: 8h 57m
Narrator: Rebecca Lowman, Sunil Malhotra
Reason Read: Book Club
Rating:

My Thoughts

I knew nothing about the story or characters when I first started reading ELEANOR & PARK. I’ve read three other Rainbow Rowell books so I was really excited to read this, and I’m sorely disappointed.

I really wish Rowell had written Park as a white person because she didn’t represent his Korean heritage very well (properly). I feel like making him half-Korean only served as a plot device to make him seem like a misfit, a huge problem in and of itself. I feel like the story suffered a great deal because of the bad Asian representation and uncomfortable descriptions of Park, Josh, and Mindy. You could definitely tell that their Korean heritage was from an outsider’s perspective.

I especially hated that the audiobook made it sound like Mindy was Chinese and not Korean. Linguistically speaking, her accent would’ve been different and she would’ve spoken English a lot better than she was portrayed to because she was immersed in English ALL. THE. TIME. She wasn’t a recent immigrant nor was she surrounded by the Korean language on a day to day basis. She also didn’t have access to Korean shows, music, or Internet links because the story’s set in the 1980s. Everything around her was English. Her broken English made her seem stupid and unable to learn the language. It annoyed the hell out of me because of my linguistic background.

I also hated that Mindy didn’t share her heritage with her sons. Park says more than once that he didn’t know what it meant to be Asian. Even if Mindy was sad to leave her country in pursuit of love, I feel like she would’ve shared her culture with her sons. The family didn’t even eat Korean food at their house. I could’ve totally gotten behind Park feeling different from the other kids in school and learning to be proud of his heritage, but none of that was explored.

I can see why there has been a lot of controversy surrounding ELEANOR & PARK and why a lot of P.O.C. readers felt uncomfortable reading it. Not only was there bad Asian representation, there was also bad Black representation. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of the books that was a pre-cursor to the Own Voices reading / writing movement. It definitely shows why Own Voices is important.

I did think it was a cute romance and I loved how much Eleanor and Park leaned on each other to survive their day to day hardships, but the problematic portrayal of P.O.C. characters overshadowed the good in my opinion.