I really enjoyed reading the book. I liked the way it was written pretty much.
Charlie’s letters are as intimate as a diary as he shares his day-to-day
thoughts and feelings. You can somehow really get to know the narrator – Charlie
– and you feel like he is writing all these letters to you. That is very
interesting. Yet there are somewhat unrealistic tones, which I noticed some time
after reading the book, because my first impression was how incredibly realistic
it was. Charlie is only portrayed as the nice, innocent teenager. He does some
things wrong, but in the end is near perfect. Even though he is screwed up, your
compassion for Charlie is overwhelming, and you seem to forget that the book
does not seem that real. Besides, in my opinion some of the letters are too
“ bookish”. However I still think the book is insightful, true and
pretty sad. 2. The language was colloquial and very easy to understand. 3. There
are lots of impressing parts, but the one I liked most is when Charlie is
telling a poem at a Christmas party to all his friends. I loved the poem because
it is that sad but, however, true, I think. It is about growing up and how
things change when you are not anymore the lovely little child but have become a
young adult. In my opinion it is written in a very sad, nevertheless nice way.
Later on Charlie finds out the poem was written by a boy just before he killed
himself. He feels really sad about this. 4. “ The perks of being a
wallflower” is the story of what it is like to grow up in high school.
Charlie, a 15-year-old freshman, is writing letters who cover his first year in
high school to an unknown person. Charlie encounters the same struggles that
many kids have to face in high school – how to make friends, family tensions, a
first relationship, experimenting with drugs – but he also has to deal with his
best friend’s recent suicide. With the help of a teacher who recognises his
intuition , and his two older friends, the seniors Patrick and Samantha, Charlie
begins to be contented with his life. Yet not for a long time – depressed when
all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which
resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about his Aunt Helen.
Nevertheless, he makes it back in due time, ready to face his sophomore year and
all it may bring. 5. In this book there is not really a climax because Charlie
only tells about his life. Though there happen several important things that
change his life a lot. One of them is when Charlie’s first relationship with
Mary-Elizabeth, a good friend of Sam, ends miserably because Charlie remains
compulsively honest about the fact that he truly loves Sam and not
Mary-Elizabeth. That hurts Mary-Elizabeth very much, and somehow the whole group
of his friends more or less does not want to see him for about one month. By the
time Charlie realises how he did Mary-Elizabeth wrong and endangered the
friendship of Sam and her. He starts to see how much his friends really mean to
him and how much he needs them. Charlie remembers the beginning of the year,
before he got to know Sam and Patrick, and how lonely he felt then – so lonely
that he started writing letters to an unknown person. He finds out what
friendship really means. That was very impressing and I really could empathise
with Charlie. 6. The ending really took me by surprise. You could see from
Charlie’s letters that he was emotionally unstable, yet I never thought he would
have such a breakdown and have to go to hospital for two months. 7. I think
Charlie was in some way like me. I did not dislike anyone of the characters,
they were all pretty sympathetic, I think. Charlie: Charlie is the third child
in a middle-class family. His older brother plays football at Penn State and his
older sister worries a lot about boys. Charlie attends high school, he is a
freshman and by no means popular. He is a shy boy, introverted and easily
influenced. Patrick and Sam think he is a wallflower. He is also very nave and
honest, which makes him a lot of problems later on. Charlie is a thinker, but he
thinks too much, which sometimes leads to confusion and anxiety. He feels guilty
about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s
family at the time of her terrible car accident. Charlie begins the year at high
school as a friendless observer, but soon is friends with Sam and Patrick. He
proves a loyal friend to his gay friend Patrick, and a helping brother when his
sister needs an abortion. Sam and Patrick: Sam and Patrick are step-siblings who
include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, tries
acid and falls madly in love with Sam. Sam is an 18-year-old girl who had to
face a lot of problems the last years in college. As Charlie’s sister tells him,
she is not very self-confident and had several bad relationships in the past.
She really likes Charlie a lot, but when he tells her at the beginning of their
friendship that he loves her, she just wants to be friends. In the end she
somehow falls in love with him, too, but then it is too late, as she is leaving
for college. Patrick, also a senior and Charlie’s best friend, is gay and has a
relationship with Brad, a pretty popular footballer. As nobody is allowed to
know Brad is gay, he has to face lots of problems according to this relationship.