This story left me melting into a puddle of feelings. To quote Eleanor, I just want to break this story into pieces and love it to death. 
 There are a lot of things to love about this story, I might as well make a list about it. Here are some of them : 
 1. It's hard to find supportive parents in YA/teen literature. YA/teen authors seem to hate parents. Parents are portrayed either to be incompetent, missing, dead, or combination of those characteristics. It's nice to have an exception every once in a while. 
 2. The 80's feelings about this book. Of course I do not have any first hand experience living in that decades, so I don't know how accurate it is. 
 3. Issue of multiethnicity represented by half Irish-half Korean Park. 
 4. Eleanor's witty remarks, and Park's sweet response to them. 
 5. Eleanor and Park are endearing as individual characters, and even more so as a couple. You want to root for them. You want them to keep their hopes up. You want them to have a happy ending- or a happy beginning, as Rowell preferred to say. 
 Reading Eleanor and Park remind me of being a teenager and in love...and convince me that sometimes, if you heard a lot of seriously positive recommendation about a book, there must be a solid reason for it. Like Eleanor and Park, sometimes you need to have hope, and trust yourself to act based on it, instead of buckling under traumatic past and your own insecurities.