Me and Earl and the Dying Girl – Jesse Andrews

Title: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Author: Jesse Andrews
Publisher: Amulet Books
Year Published: 2013
Page Count: 295
ISBN: 9781419705328

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is surprisingly well paced for a book that has a minimal plot. It was so well paced that I struggled to put the book down. All I wanted to do was to sit and keep reading it. It’s light, and humorous, and not what you would expect for a book that has themes of cancer. I enjoyed it so much, that it came to a great shock that the ending ruined it for me. It’s not that there is some major dramatic ending or anything that made me dislike it (*cough* Allegiant *cough*). It’s about the last five chapters or so, and the epilogue that bugged me. I’ll get into why it bugged me a little later into this review.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is written through the perspective of Greg Gaines. Greg is a senior in high school, and for the past three years has maintained a social status of not belonging to a group of friends. In other words, he is friendly enough with all the social groups, but he doesn’t choose a main group to sit with or whatever, in order to remain mostly unnoticed. Along with his some-what friend Earl (I say somewhat, because Greg in the book himself says that Earl is the closest thing he has to a friend but that they’re not actually friend friends – confusing right?), Greg enjoys making films, but no one apart from the two boys have ever seen their films. This is because they think they’re really bad, and have yet to make a film they can be proud of. Rachel a.k.a. the dying girl is diagnosed with leukemia in her senior year. Greg and Rachel used to be friendly in elementary school (maybe middle school, I don’t even remember), and so Greg’s mother encourages Greg to re-friend Rachel, and to help her through her trying time. During this friendship, it is decided that Earl and Greg will make a film for Rachel, and so the book then covers the various attempts of creating this film.

So this is basically all that happens. There really isn’t that much of a plot at all. Like even though not a whole lot happens, I still really loved the pacing of it. I also liked that on page 225/295, I really had no idea how this was going to end. I may have had an idea about a certain character, but that was about it. And so that was good, because books where you can predict what is going to happen can be really frustrating.

Fair warning here, the next paragraph will contain spoilers. So if you have not read this book and are planning on reading it and wish to not be spoiled, please skip the next paragraph or two.

SPOILERS.

So the thing that bugged me has to do with Rachel’s death. It wasn’t the fact that she died, but it was how we, the reader, find out about her death. The attitude was literally like oh yeah so Rachel died. I get that this was Greg’s underlying attitudes toward Rachel this entire book, but what a blunt way to say it. Oh, did you hear, Rachel died. She’s dead. No tears. No nice conversation. It literally comes up in passing whilst Greg and Earl are at a Vietnamese restaurant. Like what a bad person you are Greg. Oh and then three pages later Greg is all like this is what Rachel wanted. Oh no, I’m sorry, but you do not get to make those statements Greg when about ten pages earlier you were having a breakdown about how you never got to truly know Rachel, and understand her, and how your film should have gotten into her head but it didn’t and how you regretted that. No Greg, you don’t get to now pretend that you know best about Rachel.

You know what, the entire Vietnamese restaurant chapter ruined my impressions of this book. Up until this point I had loved this book. A lot. And then that happened. And it made me angry. I hadn’t even finished the book when I started writing rant notes about that chapter. I have 300 words ranting about this chapter that I wrote at like 12:49 in the morning, that I will spare you the details of. Just know, it was me hating on that chapter.

And like the epilogue was just as sucky. So it turns out this entire book was for a college admissions board for Greg to be reinstated (he was like suspended or something). Throughout the duration of this book Greg swore, admitted to getting high, talked about sex and boobs, etc. Was this supposed to make a good impression? I don’t think so. And like, the very last half a page of this book finally goes into a little more depth of Rachel’s death. Where was this like 20-30 pages before? This just made me angrier.

SPOILERS ARE OVER.

So that’s the plot, or lack of plot. Whatever.

 

This book is most parts me (Greg), a little of Earl, and a smidgen of the dying girl a.k.a Rachel. The characters were a range of good to not so good.

Greg is wonderfully written. He has a strong, humorous, voice, which contributes to the pacing of this book. He’s sarcastic, and intelligent, and socially awkward. However, it is the extent of his social awkwardness that I don’t like. I understand about not wanting to be friends with certain kinds of people, but not wanting to be friends with anyone? And like, with Rachel, a girl he has known for many years and whom he is sort-of friends with is dying and he just doesn’t seem to have any sympathy for her. He makes out that having to be friendly with her because his Mum said so is the worst thing in the world. He’s downright selfish, and this is the side I just couldn’t stand.

That brings us to Earl. I have mixed feelings towards Earl. I feel like he definitely has more of the sympathetic side. I mean, Earl wasn’t even kind-of-friends with Rachel previously, and yet he is the one who suggests going to visit her in hospital first, and who lets her watch their films. I liked this side of Earl. I didn’t really like his swearing, and fighting side. I get that he has a bad background primarily with family issues, but I feel like Earl was overdoing all these things. Maybe it’s because I have never met someone like Earl before, and I just find it hard to believe. I just couldn’t connect with this Earl. I did like his character development, and in particular how at the end of the novel he was striving to better his situation. Good for you Earl.

Rachel. How do I begin to describe Rachel? And no, I’m not going to launch into some Mean Girls inspired paragraph about how Rachel is flawless. Because this would be a lie. Rachel was…flat. She just had no depth. Apart from having cancer and being kind-of-friends with Greg, you find nothing else out about Rachel. Oh wait, no, you find out about her weird obsession with Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman. But that’s it. Maybe Rachel’s flatness is so that Greg can have an epiphany towards the end of the novel and be all like “I never really knew her”. But like, her flatness was frustrating. I understand that the story wasn’t supposed to be about the girl with cancer. But still, add a little bit of character to her. All she was otherwise was a girl with a name who laughed occasionally at Greg’s jokes and who had cancer. That’s it. That’s the only purpose she had in this book.

 

The best thing about this book is the writing. Andrews switches between a variety of styles. We have bullet point lists, scripts, headlines, randomly bolded words/sentences, and then just normal paragraphs. This was so engaging. I have never read a book that has encapsulated so many styles. At first I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not, but then I got to a point where I wasn’t even realising my annoyances with the different styles. I particularly liked the script style, as I thought this was a clever consistency to the interests of the main characters. If I had to pick one I didn’t like, it would probably be the headlines. Maybe if there hadn’t been so many headlines this may have been more effective? I’m not sure. It all surprisingly worked well together though.

Andrews also writes this novel in a meta-like way. Greg is writing the events of the novel as a book. Several times throughout the book it will be brought up that he is writing this book, but this was always done negatively. You would go from reading a normal paragraph to the next paragraph being along the lines of this:

“Also, I can probably write whatever on this page, because there’s no way you made it all the way to the end, because this book is a disgrace to the English language. To all language. They should take away my language privileges.”

 

This was incredibly frustrating. I can understand maybe putting this in once or twice, as I think it was meant to be a humorous thing, but the amount of times this happens is just way too many (I can’t remember a specific amount of times this happened, just know it was a lot!).

Andrews also has written some quotes that just make me go yes! I agree. I mean, these may not be those inspiring quotes that you pull from a book, but they are quotes about things I think about and so these topics made me connect a little more with Greg as a character, because now I have things in common with him. For example:

“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 it’s just a bunch of letters.”

This is something I do so much when writing essays. I always think about this when writing. Always. Even sometimes when I’m speaking, I’ll say a word so many times that it feels flat and without meaning anymore. I’m happy to know I’m not the only one with this problem!

I was going to add some more quote examples, but then I realised that they’re all a little odd. So I’m just going to stop before you all think I’m super strange. Moving on…

It’s not a full review without a cover appreciation moment, so here you go: OH MY GOSH THIS COVER IS BEAUTIFUL. Beautiful. So beautiful. I am in love with this cover. Like I literally love everything about it. I love how artsy it is. I love the colours. I love the typography. I just love how beautifully designed it is. And, in a non-creepy way, I love how this book feels. You know those books that just have a super great texture? This is one of those books (or it is if you own the paperback version published by Amulet books). I can’t even explain why I love what it feels like. I just do.

This brings me to the design. All throughout the book, the design style from the cover is incorporated. You can see it in the chapter openers (I’m not sure what to call this but I mean the drawings around the chapter name and number), in the page numbers, and in the author and title name printed at the top of each page. It makes you fall in love with every page. I also love that the last page in my book talks about who designed all the art in the book. This even includes the font used and the inspiration behind this font. I loved this. For most of my high school life, I wanted to be a graphic designer, and specifically, I wanted to work with designing books, and so this page giving these designers recognition makes me so happy. I feel like more books should do this. It’s great. Give those peeps some recognition.

I thoroughly enjoyed Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. It was entertaining, and a fast paced read. I read it in about 3ish hours. That’s an approximation though because I kind of never paid attention to the time I started. All I have is an Instagram of the photo I posted before I started reading, which I then proceeded to not start reading the book for at least another hour. I think that most people would enjoy this book, and that the ending probably wouldn’t annoy people as much as it did to me. It is also surprisingly light for a book that deals with cancer. I’m rating this book 3.5 stars. It would have been higher if not for the ending. I recommend that you give this book a try, because you won’t regret it!