Author: Jesse Andrews
Edition: Allen & Unwin, 2015
Rating: ★★★★
Review
I have to admit it. I only picked up this book because I saw the film trailer; my copy even has 'now a major motion picture' printed on the front. From the title, I was kind of expecting The Fault in our Stars take two. All I'll say about that though is, do not pass on this one if you disliked TFIOS. The only similarity between the two is the cancer.
Even then, Rachel's leukaemia takes a back seat. This story isn't about some big, meaningful, life lesson. It's just a story about ordinary characters dealing with cancer – the way real life people deal with real life cancer. There's absolutely no romanticisation of cancer here.
Greg is a great narrator, despite his constant bashing of the book he's writing. He's sarcastic and somewhat cynical, but he's also incredibly realistic. Since I've never been a teenage boy, I haven't got much frame of reference for what goes through their heads. But from my perspective, Andrews has created a character that's fairly authentic.
I loved the structure of the book, with the lists and scripts. The scripts especially built on Greg's character, highlighting the movie theme as well as Greg and Earl's love of them.
The rest of the characterisation was really well done. With long passages of speech appearing with no dialogue tags, it should have been really confusing to read. Greg, Earl, and Rachel were all such individual characters that it was easy to tell who was saying what. Plus, it meant most of the speech read really quickly and sounded like an actual conversation in my head.
My favourite thing about this book has to be it's laugh out loud humour. It's not just the sarcasm or Greg's unique view of the world around him, but also the ridiculous things that he does – apparently due to fungus eating his brain. For example:
"Just to summarise: I lurched into Rachel's room like a zombie, freaking her out, then went for a fist pound. It is impossible to be less smooth than Greg S. Gaines."
I've given Me and Earl and the Dying Girl four stars for all of the reasons above, but also because I felt the plot lacked a little. I knew that the 'Film for Rachel' was a part of the story, but it came much later than I expected. I would have also loved to have seen Rachel a lot more. I mean, she's a title character after all.
Favourite Quote
"Also, what the hell does 'weird' even mean? I've just written it like five times and all of a sudden I'm staring at it and it doesn't even mean anything anymore. I just murdered the word 'weird.' Now its just a bunch of letters. It's like there's all these dead bodies all over the page now."
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