Independent Reading 3

The theme of the book Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher is that even the small things build up to a point if pushed too far. Seventeen year old, Hannah Baker is pushed too far. She commits suicide and leaves 13 tapes behind, her thirteen reasons. One of them being Clay. Clay gets sent the tapes anonymously and starts listening to them. On his journey through listening to them, he finds that Hannah has been put through a lot. Nothing amazingly terrible has happened to her, just all these little, unavoidable things. These little things are building up though, and Hannah feels like it's too much to deal with. First it was rumors that were spread by someone she thought was a decent person, then it was the people taking her reputation and making false assumptions about her and then it was the lack of support that she felt people had for her. It was too much to handle for her. Hannah even says in her first tape, "And sometimes, a rumor based on a kiss has a snowball effect."  I think this book is kind of a message for people to think about how big of an impact something could have, not how much of an impact they think it does. Could their words or actions be a deciding factor for someone's life? In Hannah's case, somebody's were. She felt lost because nobody was going her advice and when he actually sought it, all that was given was to "move on". Your words can mean a lot.