General information about the book

The novel we chose was ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ published in 1999 by Stephen Chbosky, who is also a director and a screenwriter. This contemporary fiction book, which covers the dilemma passivity vs. passion, is his debut novel and has gained a great deal of popularity over the years.

Some of the reasons we had for choosing to read this novel were the text structure which consists of a series of letter that Charlie, the main character, sends to his pen pal over the course of two years; the topics it covers and the way it portrays what is like to feel that you do not belong at the age of fifteen; and because it was adapted into a film in 2012 and neither one of us has had the chance to watch it.

The story develops in the early 1990s, specifically between September 1991 and August 1992. Charlie lives in the suburbs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he is the middle child in a family of five. At the time the events in the book occur, he is a freshman in high school and is still recovering from a traumatic event that affected him both emotionally and socially when he was a middle school student.