"Reflection Paper: Eleanor and Park Novel by Rainbow Rowell"
Eleanor sought her role in her own comic, Park too was writing his own, with pages full of Eleanor and sketches of the future with her, but little did he know, Eleanor’s entire being is a heroine on her own.
A love or so they claim it to be, that blooms as young as the sunrise at 5 is innocent and naive, and even if you turn the world upside down, experiences as young as Eleanor and Park’s, a fallacy, creating a whole wisdom or even getting themselves into becoming a Pilosopo of their lives, a joke.
It just gets deeper and darker. Darker with happiness, darker with sorrow, and darker as they part and dim their headlights.
As the story brings us closer to what art shows us, the book shouts partly on what it really is trying to imply.
The outcast can be loved, and the outcast themselves can love. The wild red haired Eleanor with pins around her clothes felt the warm embrace of love, from Parker, from her mom, the losers who then became her friends, even from Richie, what a price.
Choices we make is what sculpts us, choices we don’t choose is what breaks us. Yes or no, right or left, there’s only two and we’re blessed to pick one, to leave and start a new fate without the brush that painted us once more or to stay and get broken into million other pieces?
Here’s a quote from Eleanor Douglas of Eleanor and Park that quite speaks to people who are in love and loved.
“She never looked nice. She looked like art and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
Far away from perfect, large and tail of traits that stand out from the rest. But like art, the crazier, the abstract, the more emotion, and the most experienced canvas gets the highest bid.
To look good wasn’t about what’s on your face, what you wear and how others see you. To look good, is to feel good about your own skin, in your own skin, with your own skin. To look good is to be good as well.
She never looked nice, true, but with Park, nice is an understatement for Eleanor is a color distant from black and white, distant from what catches the eye but close to what captures the soul.
In a jar, full of beauty, overpowering it is a jar not even half its body filled with feelings, that, is Eleanor, that is the infatuation, the rushing of blood, the pumping of it, a sugar rush inside us that blows our mind like the comic book Eleanor and Park shares.