Lucas Conklin
Mrs. Miller
Period 4
14, March 2018
The perks of being a wallflower, is a fiction book that is set up as a story of letters that the main character Charlie wrote. The author is Stephen Chboskey, who is a novelist, screenwriter and film director from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. The perks of being a wallflower, was his first novel, as well as his most successful.
Charlie has just entered his freshman year of high school when the book begins. He is quiet and withdrawn, but he is also extremely observant and thoughtful, always paying close attention to everything going on around him, even if he is only a silent witness. Charlie writes the entire book as a series of letters to an anonymous friend. The reader never learns who this friend is, and the friend never writes back. Each letter begins with the greeting “Dear friend” and ends “Love always, Charlie.” Because he never gets any of the letters back, the novel reads like a series of diary entries.
Charlie is grappling with two major traumatic deaths of loved ones in his past. The most recent death occurred last spring, when his only friend from middle school committed suicide. When Charlie was seven, his beloved Aunt Helen was killed in a car crash on Christmas Eve, which is also Charlie’s birthday. Although Charlie is nervous about entering high school, he soon finds acceptance from two main sources. First, his English teacher, Bill Anderson, recognizes Charlie’s talent for literature, and he takes him under his wing, assigning him extra books to r...
