Review: Dear Evan Hansen

Dear Evan Hansen by Val Emmich
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A novelization of a play I've been low-key really wanting to see someday, especially given that its title character fights severe social anxiety? I could read this ARC #ownvoices just on that level alone, and so I did.

Maybe if I'd already seen the musical first, I could have enjoyed the book a bit better, but...no, especially not if it were a faithful adaptation of the musical already. Which, from what I understand, it pretty much is. And what I'm seeing here, as much as I was dying to connect super-well to the material, it just felt a little too John Green for me. Like, the whole thing starts out as a coincidence leading to a little white lie that somehow balloons into a national movement rooted in sympathy for a boy all because of his bond with another boy that never really was...and the more I think about it, the more I just feel uncomfortable with the way it's all handled. Kind of like with a John Green book, this one just fails to hit me in the feels, because I feel like it's not genuine emotion they're trying to evoke here. It's too manipulative.

Not to mention, actually kinda problematic. I found myself really cringing at the initial description of Connor, with his long hair and all, as "school shooter chic." (I later found out that that line was part of the original Broadway production but has since been edited to something less insensitive, and I'm hoping that the final printed copy of this novel follows suit as well.) The whole plot that unfurls around a nonexistent friendship sounds like it should be cute and charming, but instead just comes off creepy because of how it basically takes advantage of a family's grief after their son's death by suicide. (Not to mention how Evan basically tries to use this as an excuse to get Zoe to kiss him. Which pissed me off a bit. Honest to God, I have enough trouble getting dates as a socially anxious autistic dude without having to put up with the stereotype that people like me are manipulative at best and heartless at worst.) Then, as a bi guy, I wasn't thrilled about the way queerness was woven into the novel. As I understand it, there's no explicitly queer characters in the musical (though Jared and Connor are commonly assumed to be so); here, Connor confirms he's gay, and it's implied that getting his heart broken led directly to his death. And that's after a sort of running gag of Jared, while pretending to write letters to Evan from Connor, deliberately writes sexually charged stuff until Evan makes him stop - I guess that's why fans think Jared is gay, but it makes me think more of the trope of "he's so fixated on other people being gay that he must be gay himself."

That's not to say, though, that the book's a complete and utter failure. Like I said, I do relate to Evan on the level of being very, very, very, extremely socially anxious. I'm in therapy for it too, along with depression. My therapist has tried to have me try and do similar self-improvement exercises to the ones Evan does - most notably, the iconic "Today is going to be an amazing day, and here's why" letters that Evan's therapist has him write. Though I'm actually glad my therapist hasn't actually enforced me doing such things, because I've found that actually taking steps to ensure that today will be an amazing day, instead of repeating that same platitude over and over again and not taking actual action, has better results.

That said, though...I would never consider Evan Hansen a good role model for how to cope with mental illness. I have a lot of friends with mental health issues similar to mine. We all cope in our own ways, as best we can. Even if a lot of those ways involve some level of substance abuse. (Socially acceptable substances, that is. Coffee. Booze. Weed.) But Evan, who can only make friends by lying to people, and makes zero effort to call for help when he falls out of a tree after he, rather stupidly, climbed it? That part in particular, the revelation of how he broke his arm to begin with, that completely microwaved my mind trying to make sense of it and the fact that this is the guy we're supposed to root for.

One of my dearest friends, he cares a great deal about getting mental health rep out there. You should see how much he goes off about the garbageness of 13RW. Like, that's the lowest of the low as far as he's concerned. I'm not gonna say that Dear Evan Hansen is anywhere near that bad, but if it's to the point where I would recommend he avoid it (because I bet he'd take issue with a lot of the same stuff I did, especially since he empathizes very well with the need to defeat negative stereotypes of socially anxious and/or autistic people), I would therefore recommend everyone else avoid it too.

I guess that's another strange case of "Adam Silvera liked it, but I somehow didn't."

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