Summary And Review Of The Perks Of Being A Wallflower By Stephen Chbosky

Summary

The book is written as a diary that is why it was not clear where the story exactly started. The story started on August 25th, 1991. The book is about a boy called Charlie. One day while he is watching a football game at school Patrick and Sam sat next to him, Sam and Patrick are siblings. They are both seniors. They become good friends. From that moment on they hang out almost every day. They all love listening to music and reading. Patrick and Sam also take Charlie with them to parties. He has also made new friends. Charlie starts to drink and also smoke, his parents don’t know that he drinks and smokes. He even gets a girlfriend. The story ends when Charlie’s friends leave to go to college. In my opinion, the message behind this book is that you always have to be yourself and that it does not matter if you aren’t popular at school. You can still have a great time without being very popular.

Characters

The main character is Charlie, The story is written from his point of view. Charlie is a 15-year-old high school student. He is not popular at all and his only friend that he had was Michael, but he died during the summer holiday because he committed suicide. The other characters are:

Patrick: Charlie and Patrick shared a class together, but they were never really close. He likes to smoke and listen to music.

Sam: Sam is a good friend of Charlie. Charlie has a very big crush on Sam. She really enjoys reading and listening to music.

Mary Elizabeth: Charlie and Mary dated for a short time, but Charlie ended it because he was still in love with Sam. Mary really likes reading. A negative trait about Mary is that she talks too much and never lets other people speak.

My Recommendation

I really liked this book because it talked about very serious subjects such as sexual assault, suicide, and other mental health issues. It was written in a very nice reading level. I did not struggle while reading this book because everything was written very clearly. I do think that sometimes there were too many things written about a specific event and it became a little bit boring to read. An example when there was much written about an event was when we got to read how Sam and Charlie spent their last weekend together. In my opinion, it was unnecessary to write around 4 pages about that topic. If I could change it I would make that part shorter and go less in detail about how they spent their last weekend. I also really liked that the events in the book were things that happen in daily life, that made the book more realistic. I do think that the writer could have given the reader more information about the characters and where the story took place. Overall it was a very good book and I would definitely recommend it to my friends. I’m sure that they will also like it.