Dear Evan Hansen Book Review

Dear Evan Hansen by Val Emmich et al.

Dear Evan Hansen,

Today’s going to be an amazing day and here’s why…

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.

A simple lie leads to complicated truths in this big-hearted coming-of-age story of grief, authenticity and the struggle to belong in an age of instant connectivity and profound isolation.

I know this book has been out for a little while, but like the uncultured swine I am, I have not yet seen the musical or read the book until now. And since I loathe most musicals, I don’t think I’ll be getting to this one any time soon. But I was curious about the book, so I went ahead and requested it on Netgalley.

In the beginning, I felt a lot of sympathy for the main character. Evan clearly struggles with a lot of social anxiety and he’s not good at speaking to people. He spends a lot of time in therapy and sort of watching the world go by from a safe distance.

However, I started to struggle with him as a MC quite early on in the book, around about the time that the plot started to get a bit stickier. There’s a lot of gripping tension here, but without giving away too much, I began to feel less like I understood Evan and his perspective. I get feeling like an outcast (woo boy, I get that feeling) but some of the lies he tells to keep himself in the limelight are super sketchy. At the start, I could sort of agree with it a bit because I knew Evan thought he was doing it for the right reasons, to help a family who were suffering, but it quickly descends into a region of selfishness. And my main problem with the book is that I’m not sure if this is how I am meant to feel, or not. Evan started out as a kind of cinnamon roll for me, but he quickly became problematic. I read many of his chapters feeling a strange mixture of uncomfortableness (because how many times do we feel a bit squirmy when someone is called out for a bad lie in front of you) and disgust. Some of what he does is really not okay. I suppose if this is the whole point of the book, which I suspect it is, to question this kind of behaviour, then cool. Job well done.

My other problem is how the other members of the school act when they find out about Connor. I’m not sure if I’m just overthinking this, but when I was at high school someone I knew committed suicide and it was handled very differently by students there. Yes, there were lots of people who suddenly felt very connected to that girl, to that point where they would talk about her as though they were friends, but they never got to the point where they thought to push their feelings on her family. It was still, in a way, respectful. The school in this book is more of a hyperbole, to the point where it became rather cringy and uncomfortable. Which again is probably deliberate but it left me unsure if I enjoyed the book or not.

Overall, I’m giving Dear Evan Hansen a 5/10 stars. I still can’t figure out if I enjoyed the book or not, if it was a clever critique of authenticity and grief, or if it was just one of those kinda meh YA books that you sometimes stumble across that aren’t quite self-aware. I would love to know what you all made of it, considering I haven’t quite made up my mind (you can leave comments in the comment section below). But yeah, I found myself really disliking Evan by the end of the book, despite being able to relate to him in some ways at the very start. And while the pacing was very fast and the book was easy to read, I just didn’t come away from it feeling awed.