13 Reasons Why series

As many of you know, I loved the book ’13 reasons why’ when I read it earlier on this year.  Despite struggling with one aspect of the book, the book’s ideas and aims to raise awareness of suicide kept me reading. So, I was incredibly excited to watch the Netflix series which came out a couple of weeks ago. But after watching the first episode, I wasn’t particularly happy with it.

 

The same issue that I picked up on in the book is the same in the film. The idea of the series is that we are looking at 13 different reasons why Hannah committed suicide, and how they linked to various people. This therefore suggests that other people are to blame for her death. What happened to Hannah was awful, but that does not mean she should have killed herself and that those people are to blame, as there was clearly an underlying issue which hadn’t been mentioned.

Another issue, which isn’t in the book, is the overuse of swearing. I understand that I grew up in a Christian family, went to a Christian school and now work for a Christian charity, and therefore haven’t been ‘exposed’ to swearing as much as most people will have. However, I still felt like the swearing was excessive. I can understand that most teenagers will swear when something has gone wrong in life, and others will swear all the time. But in this series, all the school kids swore at everything; there have been occasions where the teachers swore in school which I felt would be completely inappropriate in reality.

However, my biggest issue is the amount they have changed from the book. A lot has been added to the series, taking the story from lasting one night to a couple of weeks, which makes the whole story more dramatic. I found this quite disrespectful to the suicide storyline as it suggests that it was not dramatic enough. Hannah died! That is dramatic enough (I may write a whole separate blog with the differences between the book and series in). In my opinion, the story worked better over one night as I don’t believe that it would take someone that long to listen to all the tapes; most people would listen to them all in one night, or at least listen to it long enough to get to the tape relating to them in order to see what they did. Clay spends ages torturing himself not knowing what he had done to end up on the tapes, whereas in the books Clay continues listening because he wants to know what he did.

I did continue watching this because I wanted to see how it finished and all the things that differ from the book. I think that if it was not based on a book, I wouldn’t have as many flaws to point out but would still not like the series. I have no many mixed opinions about it, I can’t tell if I like it or not!

Review on the book: http://abiwb.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/thirteen-reasons-why-by-jay-asher.html

Prayer points: I pray for everyone is the same position as Hannah, that they would be able to get help easily and effective.

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