Rating: 
Summary: Amazing
Review: This is quite possibly my favorite book of all time! It tells the story of Charlie, a very real and believable character. He's a social misfit, with a history of depression. Through his letters to an anonymous friend we learn of how Charlie finally finds a group of friends where he belongs. He finally finds that moment where he feels "infinite" and ultimately discovers the real reason for his depression. Some people have said that Charlie is not a believable character, but I'm the same age he is and i find him to be very believable. I can relate to his friends, his life, and his taste in books and music. I would recommend this book to anyone! I just finished reading it for the fifth time and it just keeps getting better.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for any high school student
Review: If ever there was an anthem for the high school teenager today, this is it! Stephen Chbosky has given a stunning insight into the world of a high school student in his masterpiece "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."Being a high school student myself, I was floored at the accuracy of Chbosky's portrayal of a high school environment. Through the magnetic main character, Charlie, he portrays real issues facing high school students like teen-pregnancy, drugs, relationships, homosexuality, depression, suicide, love and acceptance. The way the novel is written brings you into Charlie's world. It entraps you and won't let you put the book down. The book is written as a series of letters written to you from Charlie. I found myself growing closer and closer to Charlie through every hilarious comment and the most serious and sad of moments. The language used is so genuine and simple, yet you see exactly what he wants you to see. I could truly relate and empathize with what he was going through as almost any other high schooler would. With each heartfelt and honest letter you grow with him and become his friend. To be honest the book was almost torturous because after each letter all I wanted to do was write back to him. The strange part of the book is that it really has no huge plot. There is no hero, no villain, no murderer...it's just an honest story of someone struggling through life. You see him fall in love, you see him depressed, you see him have fun, you see him grow, but no one wins or loses. The climax, I believe, is finding Charlie everyday in something. It's something that happens to you and you wanting to write to Charlie about it. It's reading the book multiple times (which I have) and finding something new you didn't catch the first time. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky is an honest, and truly moving novel. I strongly suggest you read it.
Rating:
Summary: It Truly Touched Me -- what can I say?
Review: In this day and age when people are so cynical and cruel, it was a pleasure to read a book from the point of view of a genuinely nice person. Charlie is a "wallflower," meaning he stands back timidly watching others live life, afraid to participate. In the course of the novel, we watch Charlie grow: make friends, go to parties, participate, even fall in love -- in other words, come out of his shell. And by the end we discover why Charlie is unable to participate in life until now; we come to understand the source of his pain. I truly loved this book; and I don't care if other people put it down! The chapters are written in letter format, and the writing is smooth and unpretentious. This is definitely the best book I've read since THE LOSERS CLUB by Richard Perez. And I discovered both books on Amazon. Anyway, if you like genuinely beautiful people, I'm sure you'll love the protagonist of this novel. You may even shed a tear for Charlie...bottom line: you'll be moved!
Rating: 
Summary: Feeling Infinite
Review: Stephen Chbosky's debut novel tells the story of Charlie, who, after the suicide of his best friend in eighth grade, is a fifteen year-old high school student living on "the fringes of life". Charlie is not popular with his peers yet he is not really ostracized: he is a wallflower, 'he sees things, understands, and keeps quiet about them.' Yet there are many things Charlie would rather not keep quiet about, such as the time he sees his sister's boyfriend hit her, witnesses a football quarterback rape his girlfriend, the terminated pregnancy of his older sister, and the truth about his aunt Helen. As Charlie navigates his way through the corridors of formidable high school, we learn about the colorful characters who influence his life: there is Bill, the first-year English teacher who gives Charlie special books to read and write essays about; Mary Elizabeth, a dominating, opinionated senior with tattoos and a pierced belly button; Patrick, the light-hearted jokester, who educates Charlie about girls, while keeping a secret of his own, and of course, Sam, Patrick's step-sister, whose beauty for Charlie goes beyond her brown hair and entrancing green eyes. In the midst of this motley crew, Charlie begins his transforming journey from adolescence to adulthood, innocence to intensity, with the first experiences of smoking pot, drinking, parties, and "Rocky Horror Picture Show". Meanwhile, all of this is relayed to us in the form of letters to a not quite anonymous person whom Charlie loyally writes to several times a month. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is like modern-day synonym for "The Catcher in the Rye", excluding the cynicism and abounding in the sensitivity of teen idol Holden Caulfield. Through Charlie, we glimpse a firsthand view of self-examination and sentiments of genuine caring, devoid of the trite negativity and disinterest so characteristic of portrayals of adolescents. There were times when the plot seemed a little stale or hard to follow. I also felt that the author was too willing to accept drinking, drugs, and sex in excessive quantities as normal "coming-of-age behavior". There did not seem to be a lot of consequences to the mistakes the characters made. Yet the various matters of subjects are handled adroitly, and the ending is a superb surprise which will shock you as it is unexpected and seemingly unfathomable. In Charlie, we find a young boy swept up into the torrents of the culture around him while desperately looking for someone to guide him on a straight path to maturity. Almost everyone can identify with being a Wallflower at times. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is for those on a quest to feel alive when they aren't quite sure what they are living for yet.
Rating:
Summary: an overrated feast for trendy emo kids
Review: Perks of Being a Wallflower is a nice book. It's sweet and funny. It has interesting characters, and a compelling (although rather lifeless) plot. It was a smooth, easy, enjoyable read. But if this book is a life-changer, than I'm Roseanne Barr. Firstly, the author tried way too hard to create an anti-hero. Instead of creating a sensitive boy, Charlie (our narrator) is a sniveling little pussy. What 15-year-old does not know what masturbation is? Or oral sex? Charlie seems to have been locked in a box for his entire childhood, and although he's not without his touching moments, I found myself wanting to punch him in the face more often than not. The writing style is interesting, and different, and it definitely keeps your attention, but the book is cliche after cliche. Charlie is socially retarded, and you'll find yourself laughing at his mishaps in love and life. But all in all, it's just MTV's latest attempt to control the lives of youth. Perks is Donnie Darko on paper. A complex and mediocre film transformed into a phenomenon by youth searching for something to cling to.
Rating:
Summary: It Truly Touched Me -- what can I say?
Review:
In this day and age when people are so cynical and cruel, it was a pleasure to read a book from the point of view of a genuinely nice person. Charlie is a "wallflower," meaning he stands back timidly watching others live life, afraid to participate. In the course of the novel, we watch Charlie grow: make friends, go to parties, participate, even fall in love -- in other words, come out of his shell. And by the end we discover why Charlie is unable to participate in life until now; we come to understand the source of his pain. I truly loved this book; and I don't care if other people put it down! The chapters are written in letter format, and the writing is smooth and unpretentious. This is definitely the best book I've read since THE LOSERS CLUB: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez. And I discovered both books on Amazon. Anyway, if you like genuinely beautiful people, I'm sure you'll love the protagonist of this novel. You may even shed a tear for Charlie...bottom line: you'll be moved!
Rating:
Summary: This book changed my whole out look...
Review: This book changed my whole out look on what people can realy go through in highschool and reading it as a freshman it opened my eyes to reality...it also helped me understand how my freinds felt when they came out of the closet to me and everybody else...lets just say i was the accepting one of the bunch. Thank you Stephen Chbosky for writting this book it realy did help me understand everything alot better.
Rating: 
Summary: A technical flop, and a great read...
Review: I probably wouldn't have written this, Amy, unless I thought you'd read it as well, so here it is...
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
(four stars)
"A Technical Flop and a Great Read"
First off, I will say that this is pulp. It's not high literature. The fact that this is being treated as such by the reviewers on this site confuses the hell out of me. If you want downer brilliant art, try reading Doesteovsky's Brother's Karamazov, or Hemingway's Farewell to Arms... or any of the books that Charlie reads off of Bill in the course of the book.
So I wouldn't call it art. To think it is is to sort of miss the point. This book fails terribly on all technical levels.
The prose are weak and simplistic. They are written by a 15 year old, but he's supposed to be a literary genius. He reads Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in less than a week while maintaining a 4.0 grade average, and hanging out with his disfucntional friends nearly every day.
The problems are all straight out of after school specials.
Teen abortion: Which was done as a boring plot device to waste pages and didn't do much to move the story along.
Drug use: (Which the author portrayed in the most ridiculous over the top manner. The LSD scene involved something as absurd as someone doing a line of crystal meth and then taking a nice relaxing nap. But this is not Electric Koolaid Acid Test or a Timiothy Leary book, so this misses the point.)
Homosexual love affairs/homophobia/hate crime: Out of all the teen melodrama stuff in the book, this part really works. It's been done to death, but done well here.
Sexual abuse: done in the standard hackneyed manner
...and so on...
But here's the rub for you high browers out there that were giving this one and two stars... you didn't get the point.
This book, like The Stranger and all the other books, if you folks didn't get it, had a large part to do with the structure of the book.
Ludwig Wittgenstein used to say that pulp books had more and richer philosophy than that which came from the ivory towers of academia.
You just have to look for it.
Let's take one of the books Bill gives Charlie, and look at it briefly.
The Stranger by Albert Camus.
All the complaints against this book can be put on to The Stranger, and those of you that maligned Perks and say you liked The Stranger probably only say so because you think you should like it.
The plot of The Stranger can be summed up almost entirely in three sentences.
A man commits a murder.
A man goes to trial.
A man is executed.
Now this is the important part of The Stranger and Wallflower.. (even though I wouldn't actually compare them directly on merit. I highly doubt that Wallflower will be taught in university literature or philosophy classes a hundred years from now, but it's the same idea)
The important part is that you're seeing these cliche events through the eyes of the narrator. In both cases deeply disturbed people in very different ways.
Charlie, the main in wallflowers, is weak, nervous, frail, and has no self perspective. If people hate him, he hates himself. If people love him, he feels great, etc. He sobs very often at what would be fairly trivial events for most people. He's hyperliterate to almost the point of absurdity. He's frightened by many things. And he finds exaltation in things as simple as a song by the Smiths or how a friend looks dressed up as Doctor Fraken Furtur...
The story isn't about the plot, it's about seeing the cliches that we're used to in this current zeitgeist (as was the case with Camus and the then over used cliche of the murder/trial novel) through the eyes of a truly unusual individual.
That's the art, and that's the philosophy.
So stop complaining about the prose or the lack of originality in the plot. That's not the point.
Rating:
Summary: Touching, insightful, honest
Review: I picked this book up one night and didn't go to bed until I'd finished it, it was just too hard to set aside. An easy, fast read that nonetheless contains page after page of writing that's stuck with me long after finishing it. As others have said, the main character Charlie speaks openly and honestly - often painfully so; his voice is a sweetly odd combination of naivety and blunt insightfulness that rings remarkably true. Oftentimes he'd hit upon episodes or comments that took me immediately back to my own high school years, leaving me with a sweet sense of nostalgia despite - or maybe in part because of - some of the darker happenings he encountered. The only part of the book I had any problem with occurs very near the end, there's a "revelation" that comes out that felt rather unnecessary in that it seems to try to "explain" things that to me didn't really need any explanation; even that revelation, however, works on some level and while not the most successful part of the story for me, neither did it take away from my overall enjoyment. A great book overall and one well worth reading!
Rating:
Summary: I really GOT INTO this book!
Review:
THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER is a short, haunting novel is about the dilemma of passivity and growing up. The protagonist, Charlie, is entering a new world. He's entering high school for the first time and he learns about who he is to the rest of the world. Charlie is a wallflower. He's different from everyone else and he shares his feelings and thoughts to us through letters. This book is more intimate than a diary, though we don't know where Charlie lives, or who he's writing to. Charlie goes through uncharted territory, living his life and running from it all at the same time. It's a great coming-of-age story. It shows the hardships and trials of growing up in life, and competing to fit in. This novel demonstrates what it's like to grow up through a teenager's mind. Along with THE LOSERS' CLUB: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez, this is one of the best books I've read in ages.
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