Thirteen Reasons Why

I am almost finished reading a book called Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher. So far I have really liked it. It is about a boy named Clay Jensen who receives a package from Hannah Baker, a girl that had recently committed suicide. The package has 7 tapes (a total of 13 stories) and a map that he is supposed to follow as he listens to the tapes. After he gets through all of the tapes he is supposed to mail the package to the next person on the list. The tapes are Hannah's suicide note. She mentions that copies of the tapes have been made, and if they don't get passed on to each of the 13 people, the copies will be made public. I wonder who has the copies of the tapes and how they know if the tapes are being passed on. I also wonder how far in advance Hannah had planned all of this, because it must have taken some time and lots of planning to make sure it worked.

While Clay is following the map to the locations of the tapes he runs into a girl named Skye who he used to have a crush on in middle school but now she doesn't really talk to anyone. I predict that after Clay finishes listening to Hannah's tapes he will start talking to her again because you never know what someone else is going through and maybe she just needs a friend.

Text to World

“She lifted one of her hands and slapped a paper on the table. She pushed it across and spun it around for me to read. It read Who’s hot/not.” ( Asher 64-65)

In the story a character named Jimmy Long makes a list that ranked girls depending on if he thought that they were hot. This made me think of when America was segregated and African Americans weren’t considered equal to white people. I know that the circumstances are very different in the book, but still both are situations when people are being discriminated against.

Text to Media

When I realized that the tapes were Hannah’s suicide note, it made me think of Amanda Todd. Amanda Todd was a girl who uploaded a video to YouTube that talked about her experiences with bullying. Both Hannah and Amanda used a form of media to share their experiences with bullying. Also, in the book when the people receive and listen to the tapes they get embarrassed and mostly they feel guilty for what they did. I think that the people who bullied Amanda Todd probably felt similarly when they saw the Amanda Todd video.

Link to Amanda Todd's video

Text to Text

This book reminded me of the book Looking for Alaska by John Green. In Looking for Alaska a girl named Alaska kills herself and her friend Miles tries to figure out why.  Clay reminded me of Miles because both of them had a crush on a girl who commits suicide, and both of them feel responsible. However, both of them also change as person as a result. Clay starts to notice people like Skye who he normally would ignore and he stops being so fast to judge people. Miles learns to forgive and he also stops being so fast to judge people and to not believe them when they say things like that.