Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

This book has gotten a lot of hype on Booktube, and it has recently been made into a movie. That should mean that it is a good book…But I really didn’t like it.

It is written partly as an “ordinary” book and partly as a film manuscript. I feel like the manuscript thing mainly happened in the beginning, but it did continue sporadically throughout the book. And this annoyed me! This changing of genre really frustrated me. Just pick a method and stay with it! 

The narrator of the story is a teenage boy, Greg, who tries his hardest to be friendly with everbody and friends with no one. He has one friend though, Earl, who is his film-making partner. They make remakes of relatively unknown films they find in Greg’s father’s collection. I guess the manuscript parts of the book reflects this interest in films and film-making. 

Greg’s narration really annoyed me, because he was constantly so self-deprecating, telling the reader that this was a bad book, and he didn’t know why anyone would continue to read it and so on and so on. That got really annoying in the end. Actually not even in the end, it was annoying from the second time…

It did have some funny-ish parts, but that kind of humor is mostly lost on me, so the parts that were supposed to be REALLY funny, were only sort of funny to me, and the rest just fell flat. 

Since Greg is the narrator we see everything through his eyes, and since he is apparently super socially awkward (nothing wrong with that, I’m socially awkward myself) most of the story is about how stupid he thinks he is and his stupid behaviour and his regrets about his stupid behaviour. I think the dying girl aspect of the story is really just a side note to the story of Greg and his very slow character development. VERY slow! The same with Earl. He seems like an interesting character, but both he and the girl are drowned out by Greg’s thoughts about himself and what things mean to him. I just didn’t really find Greg that sympathetic. He himself thinks that it’s kinda too bad that the girl dying doesn’t give him some life-changing moment of self-discovery and understanding, and I can’t figure out if this really doesn't happen or if you are supposed to understand that it DOES happen, based on how Greg reacts and his behaviour. Are you supposed to understand that his behaviour is due to the dying girl, even though he himself insists it has nothing to do with it? I just don’t know how to read that…


I gave this 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

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