Independent Reading Project- The Perks of Being A WallFlower

Perks Of Being A Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, is a teen novel that tells the story of a young boy. The plot is a man/woman themselves vs. the world. The book begins before his first day of high school. He is a nervous nelly, anticipating the beginning of the school year. He has no friends and doesn’t really look for any. He walks the hallways with his head down, to avoid eye contact. 

The main character’s name is Charlie. He is the youngest of three kids, with a mother and father. They have a pretty normal family from the outside, but once you go on the inside you realize they have as many problems as the rest of the world. One day at a football, game Charlie meets his new friends that he will be with until they graduate. The two kids introduce him to an entirely new group of kids that he had never known before. They call themselves the wall flowers. Charlie is a complicated person on the inside. He can’t always control his mind and that can get him in trouble, not with anyone in particular but mostly himself. He has to see a psychiatrist. There are many things that can trigger him to become wary or emotional. 

This is a common thing that can often be linked with anxiety. It is a normal thing to have going through high school with projects or tests or even friends, but this is not the same thing. I have sometimes experienced something of the sort. It has a lot to do with being able to control your mind and wanting it to stay calm, but while doing that, all you do is think about what is bothering you more. For Charlie, this issue comes up when he is thinking about the past (if you read the book you will know what I mean). 

I think this book, though could be debated with others, is actually a really good book. I read it and it made me think about how I was feeling more deeply and how I could relate to this book. Being a teenager in the same time period that this book was written, I can relate to most of the things that happened in the book, whether it is me personally or via someone else. 

I would recommend this book to mostly young-adults and the grown-up that likes to relive their child hood through a book. I think it gives a lot of truths that some books like to gloss over because of trying to paint teenagers as their stereotype, or even trying to go too far the opposite way. For example, I think Perks does a very good job as telling the life as it is, at least through the way  I have seen it so far. Over all I thought this was a really truthful book with a very well detailed story. 

My Creative Portion  

For my creative portion of this project, I chose to show the main character Charlie’s development throughout the story through the books that he reads. Throughout the book, Charlie reads 12 different books. Each one he reads at a different point in the story. For each one I wrote one word the described how he was feeling while reading that book. I wrote it on the back of a book that I put paper over and wrote the title and author of the book on to give it the affect that it was actually the book that he had read. Below is a picture of the books he read all stacked in order of when he read them.