Book Reviews

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2012)

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - Jesse Andrews

Rating: 2.5/5

Genre: YA, contemporary

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINIMAL SWEARING

After I finished Me and Earl and the Dying Girl I read some other reviews to see what other people thought of it and I was hard pressed to find somebody who didn’t like the book (for those of you who are actually going to read the book, the people who liked it mostly gave it 4.5 or 5 stars) but as I read some of the negative reviews I realised that Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a book you will either really love or really dislike, as for me I really disliked it.

I felt like this novel was meant to be funny but wasn’t, I mean don’t get me wrong there were some parts that I thought were funny but I wasn’t laughing my ass off. I felt like the author was trying too hard to make the main character, Greg seem funny so for me the humour sort of flopped.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is about a boy named Greg. Greg makes films with a boy named Earl. One day Greg finds out an old girlfriend of his has leukemia and his mother makes him call her so they can hang out. Greg does this. And then everything goes to shit.

Okay, so Greg is great he makes Rachel (the dying girl) laugh, he visits her at the hospital and he makes jokes about masturbating on pillows but he does it all out of pity and is basically for the entirety of the book talking about how he is a jerk and doesn’t really care about Rachel.

Also I really hated all of the “this is a really shitty book and I don’t know why you’re still reading it” sort of stuff, I mean it’s like that really annoying person that we all know that sort of hates themself and thinks they’re ugly and talks about it constantly.

Jesse Andrews has a really fun way of making the story easier to read; he changes the way the story is written (bullet points and script format…etc.).

I enjoyed the story somewhat but most of it was just Greg going off on tangents and being irrelevant.

Okay, last thing. I felt like the author was trying too hard to live up to the typical American high school stereotype aka. The groups. He talked about the goths a bit but, seriously I don’t think there are any actual goths at my school and the jocks, ohmygods the jocks, at my school we have people who like sport or don’t and that’s about it.

This book had little to no character development and was very unsatisfying.

WARNING: THIS NOVEL CONTAINS A LOT OF SWEARING, MENTIONS OF SEX, MENTION OF DRUGS AND TEENAGERS SMOKING

WARNING: NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN UNDER 13