Several years ago, I was walking through Barnes and Noble, and came across the book Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. I was immediately drawn to the title. After reading the short summary on the back, I knew I had to purchase the book. And let me just say, that was one of the best decisions I ever made. I’m not sure how many people have read Thirteen Reasons Why but it’s about a young boy named Clay Jensen who finds a box of cassette tapes on his porch one evening. He begins to play the tapes and discovers they are the last words of Hannah Baker, a girl in his class who committed suicide a couple weeks earlier. Each of the 13 tapes holds a story that Hannah explains lead to her demise, and Clay is somewhere on these tapes. Now I know this sounds heavy, and it definitely is, but this book truly changed my life. The way Asher presents this story makes it less about suicide and more about understanding. He brought to life a young girl facing experiences that many other young females deal with and showed the reader exactly how difficult these situations can be.
As a teenage girl reading this book for the first time, there was one quote that stood out more than any other. Asher wrote “no one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people” (156). This quote spoke to me because I agree with it wholeheartedly. There are so many people in my life who have no idea how much of a mark they've made on my life, both in a good and a bad way. There are obvious people, like my mother and my best friend, but then there are less obvious people, like the girl I sat next to in English sophomore year and my brother’s teammates. Thirteen Reasons Why explains that people leave lasting impressions, and more often than not, you never know who you impacted.
This book is absolutely beautiful. It has tragic and heartbreaking moments, but overall it is uplifting and inspirational. I think everyone should take the time to read this book because it will change how you look at others. It makes readers more aware of how minor comments and actions can really affect people. I promise, if you read it, your perspective on life and living will change.
