Review: Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen
Rating: 3/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher! 

When a letter that was never meant to be seen by anyone draws high school senior Evan Hansen into a family's grief over the loss of their son, he is given the chance of a lifetime: to belong. He just has to stick to a lie he never meant to tell, that the notoriously troubled Connor Murphy was his secret best friend.

Suddenly, Evan isn't invisible anymore--even to the girl of his dreams. And Connor Murphy's parents, with their beautiful home on the other side of town, have taken him in like he was their own, desperate to know more about their enigmatic son from his closest friend. As Evan gets pulled deeper into their swirl of anger, regret, and confusion, he knows that what he's doing can't be right, but if he's helping people, how wrong can it be?

No longer tangled in his once-incapacitating anxiety, this new Evan has a purpose. And a website. He's confident. He's a viral phenomenon. Every day is amazing. Until everything is in danger of unraveling and he comes face to face with his greatest obstacle: himself. 

This one's kind of hard for me to review because I really wanted to like it, but I did go out of my comfort zone a little bit for this one. You guys know I don't really read contemporary much, but I'd heard so much about the show that I was curious to see what the book was all about, and the synopsis did pique my interest. 

Evan, I felt, was quite easy to relate to in the anxiety aspect for me....but that was about it. He's struggling with things, you're watching him dig himself a bigger and bigger hole. I don't feel he was maliciously doing it, I just feel like he got put on the spot and wasn't really sure how to handle the situation and then it all got away from him a bit...and he didn't own up to it for a long time. I think he just went along with it, and then found a place for himself. His dad isn't there for him, his mum is always working and Connor's family treated him like...well, family. But I don't agree with how he treated his mum or how he handled the whole situation. I kind of feel like all there was to Evan was his struggles, there was nothing else to him, no bring his personality to life. 

As for the other characters I don't really have much to say about them, I didn't really think much of Evan's alleged friend who kept helping him with it and then dropped him after it all came out, despite the fact Evan didn't throw him under the bus. I was a bit..kind of indifferent about the other characters, except for Connor. I liked that we had Connors POV switched up with Evans throughout, it was an element that I wasn't expecting, and we had Connors story going at the same time as Evans so you see the real Connor mixed with the fictional one. The real friendship mixed with the fictional one and I did enjoy how that was done.  

In the interests of being fully honest, I did start to skim read this after a certain point because of the pace and how little was happening. I never really was hooked on the book, I could definitely put it down. I just felt like the whole book was depressing, and I'd seen people saying that the show had some humour to it but I didn't see that in the book. Yes it was accurate in how the students handled the news, I could picture the same thing happening in any school to be honest. The people who didn't know, or even treated the person badly acting like they were friends and knew them personally. I do feel like things wrapped up nicely though. 

The book had some aspects that I did enjoy, and some that I didn't. I can't comment on whether it's true to the show or not, other than that I've seen fans of the show saying it has memorable characters and humour which doesn't really fit well with the book I read. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting though.