Thirteen Reasons Why

Jay Asher

Jun 2011 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

**THE BOOK THAT STARTED IT ALL, NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES**

“Eerie, beautiful, and devastating.” —Chicago Tribune

“A stealthy hit with staying power. . . . thriller-like pacing.” —The New York Times

“Thirteen Reasons Why will leave you with chills long after you have finished reading.” —Amber Gibson, NPR’s “All Things Considered”

You can’t stop the future. 
You can’t rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.

Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why.
               
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.

Need to talk? Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) anytime if you are in the United States. It’s free and confidential.

Find more resources at 13reasonswhy.info.
 
Find out how you can help someone in crisis at bethe1to.com.

Ratings and reviews

This is my least favorite book that I was able to finish. It had such a promising premise but I couldn't sympathize with the characters at all, especially not Hannah. She felt more like a vindictive caricature of a teenage girl than an actual person. The writing itself was good enough for me to push through but I was left with a very underwhelming experience. I wouldn't reccomend it.

The theme of this book is that although one person's actions towards another might seem insignificant to the first person, they may be very meaningful to the second individual. This idea is reflected throughout the entire story, as character Clay Jenkins finds out the truth behind Hannah Baker's suicide, thus encountering that the reasons for her death all relate to things that others did to her which they thought harmless. A person's life can be very affected by the actions of another individual, whether the intentions were positive or not. The story portrays concepts about the importance of thinking before acting because the daily-life decisions one makes perhaps will change another person's world entirely. Making the wrong choice when involving one's actions comes with a series of extremely critical effects that can hurt others in very strong manners. Jay Asher did well in choosing the setting in which the story took place because it just clicks perfectly with the plot. In the story, the characters have the qualities of people who would live in a small town, this meaning that the setting is supportive of the events due to the size of their town. Hannah goes in her Freshman year of high school knowing almost no one in her school because she is new, but the smallness of the town allows her to make friends quickly and meet a lot of new people, this being the beginning of a chain of events that are all somehow tied together. Something that I did not like about the book was how the author does not give enough details in the end about how the other people involved in Hannah's suicide felt towards the tapes and their reactions when listening to them. A little more information on this might have helped understand how the characters in the end realize that they cannot go around doing things that will hurt other people. I would recommend this book to anyone who is into suspenseful and mysterious stories, and anyone who needs to be more open-minded about life.

After I read this book I've pondered on what I could possibly write as a feedback. The thing is, I couldn't. I bought this book out of curiosity, and more like an impulse because I needed something that might shake my mind. I tell you it did, at first it was like, “Okay, I get it, quite a ordinary teenager-type of story”, but the thing is it wasn't. I'm more like the type of Fantasy and Science Fiction, because their stories make my mind fly away when life is too real and harsh, and other times they give me the touch of reality when everything seems ethereal. But, at intervals, I need a book or two that speaks of real life, of things that might be happening right now, so "Thirteen Reasons Why" popped out like a little stop to make me think. After a while, I was both reading the book and the feedback of other readers, and even when some are right about not seeing the personality of some characters I rather differ thinking them as unnecessary, the story was about Hannah's point of view, not Clay's not everyone else's. What I see here is a sneak peek into a story that might one day become true, thus was the background, what's coming next should be the aftermath of such traumatizing experience, how would they see each other after all of them hear what Hannah had to say? How would they react? Would they help one another in order to ease the guilt? What might happen? What about the girl at the end? The one Clay stopped? I believe that it should be course of action, because I assure you, if a second part is going to come, I'll read it. And, for those who think it as dull or immature or the writing of a person ignorant of the reality of such cases, well then, I recommend you to think again, because not everyone reacts the same way, perhaps to somebody a dead uncle might seem the end of the world, though for somebody else, alien to that person's thoughts, it may look like a natural thing, the way life works, so, please, if you don't like how someone picture the story that hunts them at night, just ask them why they did it that way, don't insult them, nor tell that the story sucks, because that is the worst thing you can do to people that expose their work to public

About the author

JAY ASHER's debut novel, Thirteen Reasons Why, a #1 New York Times and international bestseller, has sold over 3 million copies in the United States alone and is now a thirteen-part series on Netflix. The Future of Us, his second novel, was co-authored with Printz Honor winner Carolyn Mackler. He is also the author of the New York Times bestselling What Light. Piper, out in Fall 2017 and co-authored with Jessica Freeburg and illustrated by Jeff Stokely, will mark Asher’s graphic novel debut. His novels have been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives with his family in California. Follow him on Twitter @jayasherguy.