The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky Undeniably cool story, but felt rather like a jumble of all the issues young adolescents may have. Not only relationship issues but some very serious stuff, like suicide, abortion, rape, child molestation, domestic violence etc. Any of those subjects would be disturbing and worth pondering about alone, and here are they all, mentioned in too episodic, too commonplace way, not having any significant impact on anything and anybody later in the story. Charlie also wasn’t really a character I could relate to, because he was so weird behaving -- and don’t tell me I should be more compassionate with him, as he was like that supposedly because of his childhood traumas. Trauma I believe, unless physical, does not lower affected people’s intelligence, so I must assume that state of his mind was present from his very birth. He behaved irrationally, occasionally very dumblike, as if he was constantly stoned -- everything had to be explained to him very plainly and directly, in very clear sentences, mercy on us all if something was omitted in some particular conversation, so it was really hard to believe that he was such genius as his teachers claimed him to be. Maybe letters weren’t the best form of expressing both his state of mind (health of which seemed at times quite dubious) and the occurrences in his close environment, because he was pretty good in describing what’s going on around, just to play dumb when he was supposed to translate the impact of these events on his relatives, friends and himself, his mind and feelings.