Ari Armstrong's Web Log (Main) | Archives | Terms of Use
Review and Study Guide for Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why
Even seemingly minor acts of cruelty can accumulate and lead to deeper harm.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2026
I read this book as part of my review of the books suppressed by Colorado's Elizabeth School District. See the main document.
Trigger warning: This review discusses teen suicide in the context of fiction. Some readers may not want to delve further. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is 988 (U.S.). In cases of immediate danger, call 911.
Thirteen Reasons Why
Jay Asher
Razorbill, 2016 (originally published in 2007), Deluxe Tenth Anniversary Edition
Reading Notes
Based on what I'd heard about Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why, I fully expected to hate it. And largely I did. But I also came to appreciate it as a series of morality tales, adding up to the insight that even seemingly minor acts of cruelty can accumulate and lead to deeper harm. Most of the novel is about people behaving badly, sometimes horribly, and, insofar as readers take the appropriate negative lessons, that's great. I also like that the characters of Clay and Tony serve as good role models. If I'd had a chance read the book in my youth, it might have discouraged me from doing some mean things and encouraged me to be nicer.
So why did I largely hate the book? (Spoilers follow.)
The central plot device is that, before killing herself, a girl (Hannah Baker) records a series of audio tapes in which she describes bad things that some other students in her school have done, mostly to her. Then she mails a set of these tapes to the first subject of the tapes, and directs that the tapes be passed from one subject to the next, twelve in all (one person gets two tapes), on pain of public release of the tapes.
I just don't think that Hannah as a constructed character hangs together psychologically. We the readers are expected to believe that Hannah is at the same time extremely self-aware, astonishingly insightful about others' motives and failures, willing and able to plot an elaborate pay-back campaign complete with a blackmail mechanism to play out from beyond the grave, and also deeply suicidal. This combination is psychologically implausible.
Asher also expects Hannah to serve the role of unusually authoritative big-picture narrator even as she descends into profound personal crisis. That, again, is not a reasonable expectation in terms of psychological realism.
Hannah, then, almost has a dual personality in the novel. On one hand, exhausted by mistreatment at the hands of others, she slips into catastrophic personal crisis. On the other hand, she remains highly aware and rational, so much so that her suicide almost seems like a self-conscious campaign of retribution.
That first Hannah, a sweet, sensitive, and enthusiastic girl when not under an emotional weight, is extremely sympathetic. I very much like that Hannah, and reading the novel of her demise while sitting with her voice is painful, nearly unbearable. The second Hannah, the calculator and blackmailer, is not so sympathetic.
There is also a certain blindness to the book. Asher presents people as hard to read and small acts of meanness as capable of contributing to great harm. Yet we are to assume that the effect of the tapes is solely justice for, and perhaps moral improvement of, the subjects who listen to them. Can we not imagine, given the premises of the novel, that the tapes themselves might spur a crisis in the life of someone like the jealous Jessica Davis or the callous Courtney Crimsen or even the morally blind Justin Foley? Or maybe only blameless people deserve not to be pushed into emotional crisis?
However, we have good reason to think that Asher never intended the book to be a realistic study of suicidality. In the introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition, Asher writes of the book, "I wrote it as a suspense novel." That explains the tapes. It explains why Hannah put Clay in the tapes and deep in them, making him and the reader wait to discover if he did anything wrong in Hannah's eyes (he didn't). Hannah could have just sent Clay his own set of tapes with an explanatory note to save him (and us) the anxiety, but that wouldn't have been suspenseful. Often the suspense seems to take precedence over psychological realism.
Interestingly, at the end of the anniversary edition, Asher reveals, "When my editor first received the manuscript, Hannah survived the suicide attempt." That edition reproduces the original ending. I think this too suggests that Asher was more interested in the suspense and morality-tale angles of the story than in its suicide.
All this adds up to the conclusion that we should treat the novel primarily as a series of morality tales rather than as a psychologically realistic portrait of adolescent suicide. Once you accept that, I think it's an interesting and well-written story with a lot worth contemplating.
I'm writing about the book in the context of its suppression by the Elizabeth School District (and challenges to it elsewhere).
Obviously it's controversial because it deals with suicide. And that's hardly a crazy concern. Netflix released a series in 2017 based on the book, and one study noted that "an immediate increase in suicides beyond the generally increasing trend was observed among the target audience of 10- to 19-year-old individuals in the 3 months after the show's release" (remember that observations do not by themselves get at causation). The study worried about possible "media contagion."
This points to another weakness of the book as revealed from the outside: Asher is concerned with mean acts that the actor knew, or reasonably should have known, were mean. This omits the accidentally mean and meanness of which the actor may not be aware, an insensitive joke, say, or a comment that unexpectedly hits someone in a particular way. Asher's book, and the Netflix show based on it, plausibly may have contributed to some number of suicides, something he clearly did not intend. Yes, the novel is explicitly anti-suicide, yet, we may reasonably predict, it also may cause some readers to feel that suicide is a means to get others to take one's self and sorrows seriously. Hannah's tapes certainly have that effect in the novel. To what extent should we expect authors (and publishers) to worry about long studied risks of suicide contagion?
Another source of potential controversy: The novel discusses a rape and some sexual activity with a bit of detail, although not at length.
Do I think high schools should pull this book from shelves? No. I'm fine with the idea of parental permission. (If I faced such a choice I'd sign a blanket permission form to let my child read whatever books he wanted.) I do worry about suicidal kids (or adults) reading this book. However, obviously reading a book cannot by itself cause a person to commit suicide. At most it might be a small part of a much larger problem.
Asher, of course, intends his book to speak against suicide, and I suspect that the book may have helped some people choose a path other than suicide. Through his narration, Clay very clearly and repeatedly criticizes Hannah's choice to kill herself. The novel strongly encourages people not to be bullies and to proactively reach out to people who may be suffering. (However, another study suggests the "positive effects do not balance the deleterious impact" of the show in terms of suicides.)
Notably, many more people watched the show than read the book, so that alone would suggest that the show had wider cultural impact. Also, I wonder if there's something about moving the story to screen (besides sheer number of viewers) that caused more problems for some viewers already in a bad mental place.
Regardless, almost everyone who reads the book or watches the show does not commit suicide. Books are powerful things often full of powerful ideas and stories, but they do not have the power to compel an action. Just about any book can be read in such a way as to inspire bad or tragic acts (e.g., the Bible). The most powerful way to build a critical and knowledgeable mind is to actively read more books. So I'm certainly not going to advise suppressing this one, especially given how much of value it has to say about moral action. The key is to read with discernment.
Ordinarily, I would not bring an author's personal life into a review of this kind. Here, however, Asher's own later admissions are unusually relevant because they illustrate one of the central themes of Thirteen Reasons Why, people's ability to be blind to the pain they cause others.
While married, Asher had affairs with multiple consenting adults. Other unsubstantiated claims about Asher aside, cheating on your spouse is a big deal. Asher acknowledged this; a spokesperson said on his behalf, "Mr. Asher was married at the time of these relationships, as were many of the women. He is deeply sorry for the pain these consensual decisions caused his family, and others." Asher himself conceded that he made a "horrible decision" and "cheated" on his wife.
The point here is not to beat up on Asher or to trash his book based on his own actions. The point is that we can easily imagine an Asher-type of character receiving a tape such as Hannah recorded. Certainly some of the people to whom Hannah addressed a message committed lesser offenses. Yet, as of the Tenth Anniversary Edition, prior to the information about Asher's affairs went public, the book's publisher implicitly presented Asher as someone with unusual moral insight. After the main text of the book is a section titled, "Readers React to Thirteen Reasons Why." One reader describes the book as "life-changing." Another says, "It makes me understand how a little action we made could change someone else's life. . . . It's the kind of book that has the power of changing your vision of life." Another says, "This book gave me a reason to keep going and to always try to have a positive effect on the people around me."
Notably, the affairs overlapped the period in which Asher wrote the novel. How extraordinary that he could give Hannah such moral insight into the actions of others while lacking that same insight into his own actions, at least in that respect. The novel well-recognizes that seemingly small acts can have big long-term consequences, but it could have done more to explore how people can be self-blinded to their own damaging acts.
Asher expressed remorse for the pain he caused. Although the novel very much is about Hannah pointing fingers, it also allows for the possibility of grace, forgiveness, and moral growth. I for one am happy to view Asher's situation with some grace.
Questions for Discussion and Review
I intend these questions for readers who are mature and not in emotional crisis. The Tenth Anniversary Edition ends with its own discussion questions.
1. Hannah says "everything matters" (p. 13), refers to the "snowball effect" (p. 30), says "what you do affects others" (p. 95), and says often "we have no clue" how we affect others (p. 156). This culminates in the insight, "Everything affects everything" (p. 201). To what degree or in what way is that true? False? How much responsibility does a person have for distant and indirect effects?
2. "You can't disprove a rumor," Hannah says (p. 30). What does this say about misinformation, people's willingness to believe the unsubstantiated, and the individual's responsibility to verify or discount claims?
3. Initially Clay laughed at the list of "best/worst" names (p. 39). Clay tends to believe the rumors about Hannah, or at least not actively disbelieve them or check to see if they are true. How is it that people sometimes can so easily overlook hurtful actions? Why are people often tempted to go along with the crowd and believe what's repeated?
4. Clay narrates, "How will Hannah say that I scarred her? . . . I should not be on this list" (p. 41). Why does Hannah include Clay in the tapes and in their rotation? How does knowing he's in the tapes cause Clay to reflect on poor decisions he's made and problems he's missed?
5. How does Clay's narration help explain and sometimes challenge Hannah's narration? Do you find that two-voice structure effective storytelling?
6. Which characters actively harm Hannah and which merely fail to help her? What is the moral difference between the two? How is the failure to help different between Clay, Tony, Hannah's parents, and Mr. Porter?
7. The rumors about Hannah were false. Some people took those rumors as a pretext to mistreat Hannah or even to sexually assault her. What does this say about people's ability to rationalize or excuse misdeeds? About traditional expectations of sexual "purity"? About social toleration of brutish behavior? How might the novel have handled a sexually promiscuous or adventurous character in terms of the reactions of others?
8. Hannah addresses a wide variety of misdeeds from the relatively minor (using someone for a ride) to the horrible (rape). Why does Asher include such a wide range? Why does he select the stories he does? How do the stories show how Hannah is progressively stripped of her dignity and of her values?
9. Hannah says that "everything about" the picture with her and Courtney "was false" (p. 124). Clay narrates, "With every side of every tape, an old memory gets turned upside down" (p. 133). What is the novel saying about the difficulty of really knowing about someone else's life?
10. At one point Clay narrates, "I hate what you did, Hannah. . . You didn't have to do it and I hate the fact that you did" (p. 145). To what degree does Hannah deserve blame (along with understanding and sympathy) for her suicide? Is Clay right here? Does Hannah inappropriately put too much blame on others for her own choices? What is the novel saying about the interplay between environment and personal responsibility, and is it right about that?
11. Hannah says that sometimes we have "thoughts that aren't even true" and "aren't really how we feel" (p. 174). What does she mean by that?
12. Why was Hannah unable to seek help from the people who cared about her? Looking back, what realistic alternatives might she have pursued?
13. Why is Mr. Porter so dismissive of Hannah's problems (or is that the right way to describe his response)? Is his reaction realistic? How should he have responded? How much responsibility does he have for Hannah's death?
14. Skye represents the hope of helping someone through an emotional crisis. Does Clay talk to her primarily to prevent a potential tragedy or primarily to explore a possible friendship with her? If the former, does that risk turning Skye into something like a charity case?