Once again I scrolled right to the bottom of today's review, and was relieved to find that the righteous winner of all tournament rounds has triumphed! I really, really liked this book, you guys.
It's difficult to even compare these two novels because of the disparities in genre; even though both focus on teenagers, and to a certain extent on interracial teenage love (at least in the case of Eli and Hates Work, the Comanche girl he kind of has a relationship with) but while ELEANOR & PARK is basically a romantic comedy, THE SON is pure epic. There are parts of THE SON that are funny, as I discussed in the last review, and parts of ELEANOR & PARK that are dark and tragic, but it's hard to even imagine J.A. McCullough reading E&P or Eleanor reading THE SON.
I want to talk briefly about the dark parts of ELEANOR & PARK, and whether the choice to make the stepfather's ultimate transgression writing dirty comments on Eleanor's textbooks was the right choice. Kicking Eleanor out of the house would have been unforgivable to a reasonable parent; destroying her things and the threat of physical violence against her mother certainly should have been enough to spur Eleanor to leave. I guess I just didn't find it realistic that her stepfather would have been the one writing insults on her textbooks. He barely seems to pay attention to her, much less to her textbooks, and it does seem like he was comfortable being confrontational and directly antagonistic toward Eleanor; why would he have to result to writing on her textbooks, and in such a way that it seemed like he was trying to hide it? He didn't try to hide anything else he did to her. I feel like Rowell wanted to go someplace darker, but felt that for the sake of genre or the likability of her story, she had to stick with the crime of being threatening rather than violent.
That shying away from reality for the sake of sparing the reader is something the ToB judge identifies in a different context: the fact that E&P's relationship is chaste until the very end of their time together seems unrealistic to him, having been a teenage boy, and pretty unrealistic to me as well. I certainly knew other teenagers, when I was a teenager, who had relationships every bit as G-rated as Eleanor and Park's...but they were also religious, which E&P are not, and in the absence of an explanatory force like overwhelming moral obligations, I also find it unrealistic that they wouldn't have at least discussed their abstinence.
You know who doesn't flinch from sharing any detail or scene to spare the reader? Philipp Meyer, that's who. And it's partially because these books are pitched at different readers; there are some teenagers to whom I wouldn't recommend THE SON, and some of my relatives who might not enjoy it, and some serious types who I don't think would find E&P captivating. On the whole, though, I think there are more readers who would appreciate THE SON than E&P; THE SON has so many different types of characters, and different story lines, and a broader historical reach. E&P is a vignette. THE SON is an entire collected works.
My winner, and ToB's: THE SON
Read the official Tournament judgment here.
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