eleanor & park by Rainbow Rowell

"XTC was no good for drowning out the morons at the back of the bus. Park pressed his headphones into his ears" (p1).

Because of that line, I think I fell in love with the character of Park the first time I met him. Park is this quiet guy, pretty dorky, who mainly keeps to himself, loves comic books and new wave music, and falls in love with crazy, red-haired, mixed-up family girl Eleanor.

Park is just a great character. His mother is a small Korean woman his father met during his service in the Korean War. He married her and then brought her to live in America. Barely five feet tall, and with a personality much bigger, Park's mother is a hairdresser and her salon is in the garage. It turns out, Park is quite adept at helping her, as he often does when she is setting a girl's hair for a dance or the prom-- he hands her bobby pins, the curling iron and gets whatever else she needs while working.

Park is a guy who is comfortable in his own skin, but not to the point of being obnoxious or unlikable about it. When Park's mother gives Eleanor a make-over, she shows every make up "thing" to Eleanor before she does it-- using Park as a human model. So Park ends up wearing eyeliner, and looking pretty good. And he decides to keep wearing it. It's 1986-- things like that were kinda cool then, remember.

I really love how the friendship between Eleanor and Park begins. Having nowhere else to sit on the bus, park finally slides over in his seat and yells to her to sit down (in more choice language than that). Every day she sits with him and looks at him, out of the corner of her eye, reading his comic books. Gradually, Park begins to move his books toward her and they read them together. Embarrassed, Eleanor has to admit she doesn't have a walkman or tapes to listen to, but she has so many songs she wants to hear. So Park begins slipping her comic books to read, and then lends her his walkman and makes her tapes of all the songs she wants to hear. And before long, he winds up head over heels in love with the crazy girl with a checkered past and dysfunctional home life.

I can't say I have ever encountered a character much like Park before-- popular, but not too popular. Comfortable being with his family, as well as being himself (the eyeliner incident). He's book smart, but he isn't a nerd. The author keeps him in that grey area, and I like that. No stereotypes.