When Park first spots Eleanor, it isn't love at first sight as the ill-at-ease girl looks for a seat on the bus. " 'Jesus-fuck,' Park said softly, nodding to the space next to him, 'just sit down.' " But Park's initial distaste slowly becomes attraction as they bond over mutual interests, especially music. Although Park hardly hangs with the popular crowd in high school, Eleanor is a true outsider, moving through the world like someone who doesn't believe she's worthy of love. Recently back with her family after time in foster care, Eleanor has no privacy in their cramped home, where there's never enough money and too little safety with her mother's dangerous boyfriend on the scene. Meanwhile, biracial (Korean/white) Park is increasingly at odds with parents who don't seem to understand who he is or how he expresses himself. Both his dad's anger and his mom's dismissal of Eleanor hurt. Eleanor and Park's alternating perspectives follow them from the time of their initial encounter through their growing intimacy in a tender and complicated love story. Rainbow Rowell drills down to the deepest levels of her characters as the beautifully developed relationship between Eleanor and Park is affected by the tumult in their lives. Prejudice and assumptions due to class, race, and other dimensions of appearance (Eleanor's weight, Park's choice to wear eyeliner) are portrayed as they play out in real life-in ways both subtle and overt. Believable, well-developed secondary characters add to the richness of a novel in which everyone is achingly, infuriatingly, poignantly human, for better and for worse. (Age 14 and older)

#1 New York Times Best Seller!

"Eleanor & Park reminded me not just what it's like to be young and in love with a girl, but also what it's like to be young and in love with a book."-John Green, The New York Times Book Review

Bono met his wife in high school, Park says.
So did Jerry Lee Lewis, Eleanor answers.
I'm not kidding, he says.
You should be, she says, we're 16.
What about Romeo and Juliet?
Shallow, confused, then dead.
I love you, Park says.
Wherefore art thou, Eleanor answers.
I'm not kidding, he says.
You should be.

Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits-smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember your own first love-and just how hard it pulled you under.

A New York Times Best Seller!
A 2014 Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Excellence in Young Adult Literature
Eleanor & Park is the winner of the 2013 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for Best Fiction Book.
A Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of 2013
A New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2013
A Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Book of 2013
An NPR Best Book of 2013