Thirteen Reasons to Read This Young Adult Novel Whether or Not Your Children Can

Several weeks ago I unexpectedly found myself with an extra 36 hours on hand and absolutely nothing to occupy them, having missed the flight that would get me home.   Though I sorely itched to get there, the layover ended up being a rather convenient inconvenience; I can’t remember the last time I had so much unabridged time to read.

The second of the three novels I had the chance to sweep through in Terminal G really left its mark. 

For several months, both on NPR and in bibliophile circles, I had been hearing about this sleeper hit — Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why.   When I hit Hudson Books and saw it on the racks, I picked it up eagerly.

While initially marketed as a young adult novel at its release in 2007, Thirteen Reasons has a much broader audience following the tragic suicides that made national headlines last year . . . young men and women such as Tyler Clementi, Phoebe Prince, and Raymond Chase, youth who killed themselves in response to the bullying that either slowly, or violently, eroded their self worth and their sense of hope in the future.  As bullying has once again became an topic of national discourse, so this book has started to help frame a dialogue for educators, parents, and young adults.

Thirteen Reasons begins as high school student Clay Jensen finds a package lying on his stoop.  Inside are 7 tapes, each one numbered in succession.  Curious, he goes to the garage, where his dad keeps the old boom-box with a tape deck.  He pops the first tape in.  Wafting over the air, he hears the unmistakable voice of Hannah Baker, a girl in his class who killed herself with an overdose of prescription drugs barely two weeks earlier. 

Before she actually did the deed, Hannah had decided for her death not to be in vain; in the days leading up to her suicide, she made thirteen recordings.   They not only recounted the events that played a role in her decision to kill herself, but identified the people who played a role.  As she states at the beginning of tape one:

“The rules are pretty simple.  There are only two.  Rule number one: You listen.  Number two: You pass it on.  Hopefully, neither one will be easy for you.”

The tapes were to make their rounds to each person involved in her death . . . to be listened by each person in their entirety . . .  or a second copy would be released to the public.

It was a guerilla tactic, perhaps, but one which creates a framing device for this novel, which recounts Clay’s struggle to make sense of his role in the affair — an interior monologue that runs parallel to the monologue Hannah has recorded on her tapes.  


As he moves through their town, a celebrant at the altar of all the sites in which she was slowly, silently degraded into despair, he becomes increasingly aware that the violences we are capable of committing to another person take all forms: carelessness, silence, rumor, emotional manipulation, objectification, outright aggression and, of course, passive aggression.

We readers become increasingly aware of them too.


This book made me reflect on my own adolescence: was this how it was when I was in high school?  I don’t know.  . .  to say I was oblivious of the goings on of high school is an understatement; I was an absolute social moron, and rather embraced it. 

Perhaps that saved me. . . more likely, I think now, it made me unwittingly part of the problem. 

Whether your children are 2 or 12, the time to read Thirteen Reasons Why is now.  Read it to prepare yourselves for thinking about the world that our children are entering into.  It is one where bullying takes extraordinary new forms: it is often sexualized, it often involves refined acts of psychological manipulation, and it all too often is a contagion, wholly inescapable for its victims, due to the powers of internet technology.

Part Two