This is the sort of novel I think that everyone should read at some point. It certainly was a novel I needed to read, especially at this point in my life.
The novel, later adapted to the screen by it's own author, is a collection of fictional letters written by a teenaged boy who refers to himself as "Charlie". These letters detail "Charlie's" freshman year of high school as well as certain events of his past. Whom the letters are adressed to is never really explained beyond "a person who didn't have sex with this other person at a party, whom some girl was talking about being very trustworthy and stuff".
The identity of the person he writes to isn't really that important, because really, I think the point of the book is that "Charlie" could be anyone (YOU, for example) and could be writing to anyone (YOU, for example). Granted, my life isn't as fucked up as "Charlie's", but there are still things I could identify with.
I seem to remember at some point, way back when I had to read Breathing Underwater by Alex Flinn for school (twice), that I was pretty annoyed at the fact that there were so many books, TV shows, and movies about high school kids with such depressing/interesting lives (self-harm, abuse, sex, drugs, wild partying, et cetera) and almost none about high school kids with lives similar to mine (i.e. boring, would not make good television). The thing is, I was more passive back in junior high and high school. I wasn't even the person with the "normal" life who had friends with "depressing" ones; I was the person who had the "normal" life who had friends with "different but not sad" lives. And I was very much aware of this. So at the time, I regarded this sort of material with a slight animosity (though, I haven't heard of Perks of Being a Wallflower until years later).
I remember when a production of the musical Spring Awakening came to Yakima's Capitol Theater. My family, being theater goers, went to see it. And I remember being angry at how needlessly depressing that show was. It had everything. A scene about masturbation, a scene where a girl tells her friends about her father abusing her, a scene where the female lead asks the male lead to hit her with a riding crop so that she could know what it's like to be abused, a scene where the male lead has sex with the female lead even though she doesn't know that that's where babies come from because her mother wouldn't tell at the beginning of the show, a scene where a kid is driven to suicide by his own sexual frustration, a scene where the male lead is held responsible for the kid's suicide because he gave him a book about sex, a scene where the male lead is thrown in jail while the female lead's mother takes her to get a back alley abortion, and a scene where the male lead breaks out of jail only to find the tombstone of the female lead. Fuck. This. Noise.
So why would I like Wallflower, even though it has such content, and write off Spring Awakening as a waste of time? Really, it's because Wallflower is a book. It takes me a while to read books, meaning that I have more time to spend with the characters, and more time for me to get attached to them. A musical is a story concentrated to 2-3 hours, giving me less time to give a shit about characters that are essentially recycled archetypes anyway. So in musicals, I focus more on the plot and goings-on than I do the characters. And when all I have to focus on is depressing shit piling on like that when I'm not invested in who it's happening to, I get irritated.
That being said, Wallflower also has a few choice quotes, which I'm sure some of you have seen repeated endlessly. This is where "I swear we were infinite" comes from. But there is certainly more beyond that.
So by all means, read this book.
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