Book Stuff: Trying out YA - Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

As a 33 year old I can't get excited about YA books, but booktube has made me feel bad about this and I've been wondering if I'm missing out on something really great by not reading that genre. It's not that I don't remember what it was like to be a teenager, I honestly do, but when I read a book I want to relate fully to a character and for them to spark emotions in me that are relevant to my life today, and I think that requires adult main characters. Whilst watching booktube over the summer I made a list of a few of the YA books that people seemed to be raving about and decided I would give them a try at some point this year, one of those books was Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Everybody seemed to have this book in their top 10 YA book videos, so I was delighted to stumble across it in my local library. A few pages into the book I thought to myself "this book reminds me of something", and after mulling it over for a while I realised that it reminded me of Judy Blume's style of writing and characters and that made me reminiscent for my childhood. Eleanor & Park tells tne story of a girl named Eleanor and a boy named Park who are kind of the school misfits, through sitting next to each other on the school bus they develop a friendship that progresses into a deep teenage love. I wanted to love this book more than I actually did, it is wonderfully cute and it did take me back to those giddy days as a teenager when you first fall for somebody, and there is all that excitement of finding out about each other. I felt like I wanted more though, I wanted to know more of the intricacies of the characters and what made them so different to everybody else, it wasn't enough for me that Eleanor was an outsider because she had red hair and was slightly chubby, and Park didn't fit in because he was half Korean, there was scope to take the characters a lot further than the author actually did. I know that 14 year old me would have adored this book, and I would have found the ending the most romantic and heart wrenching thing ever, but I think it was just too 'YA' for me. I am glad though that young people of today have a 'judy blume' type author to give them 'all the feels'.