After all the hype I’ve heard about Dear Evan Hansen over the past couple of years, I think it’s fair to say that it was unlikely to live up to expectations. But unfortunately I have to say I found this book quite disappointing. 

Despite all the hype, I wasn’t actually that familiar with what the plot would be (if I’m honest I’m more familiar with the songs!), but I found Evan’s character to be fairly annoying and extremely self centered and I couldn’t bring myself to feel any empathy for him at all. 

Basically, he writes a letter to himself which gets confused for someone else’s suicide note and he’s drawn into Connor’s family’s story of grief. He could get himself out of all the trouble by just telling the truth but he doesn’t. 

And things spiral pretty quickly - there’s a viral website, he’s suddenly popular and getting more attention than he could ever imagine, and the girl of his dreams has finally noticed him. Unfortunately, said girl happens to be Connor’s sister. And the less said about that, the better. 

The blurb of the book was: 

Maybe I’m just too old and cynical - it is a young adult novel after all. But this one just wasn’t for me.