Catcher In The Rye Review

Hello everyone,

Today I have a review of The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, which I gave a 1 out of 5 stars. Unlike most people, I wasn't forced to read this in school, but I was interested, and since it was a classic, I borrowed it from one of my friends. Also, I'll just say right now that this review will pretty much remain spoiler free.

In The Catcher in the Rye, we follow Holden Caulfield as he gets kicked out of his boarding school and wanders around New York City for three days. I don't have much else to say. I'm not quite sure how to give a summary of this book at all. You can follow the Goodreads link for one, but I don't quite agree with it and it doesn't give you a clear idea of what the book is about either.

For 214 pages, we follow Holden's stream of consciousness through New York, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. To be honest, one of the main reasons I rated it a 1 out of 5 stars was that it didn't make me feel anything at all. It wasn't that it was a bad book per say, I didn't have to force myself to finish it, but neither did I particularly want to keep reading. Not too much actually happens in the book. It's mostly just Holden's thoughts, which I found to be quite confusing and hard to relate to.

I found the book itself to be very unorganized. Holden quickly changes topics at random, and I often found myself confused. He will also often tell the readers that he likes something, then proceed to give plenty of reasons as to why he doesn't like it. Even when talking to the people around him, I found his speech very spontaneous and confusing, often switching from idea to idea too quickly.

As for the writing, I wasn't very impressed by J.D. Salinger's style. I understand that it was supposed to be a stream of consciousness, but his overuse of certain words (ex. "phony", "it killed me", etc.) quickly grew to be annoying. Also, even though it was 214 pages of Holden's personal thoughts, I couldn't really tell you all that much about him. We learn about his family and the people he knows, but never enough to really get to know them. We learn about events in his past, but never go too far in depth with them. They're not given much attention nor explained very well.

Overall, the Catcher in the Rye wasn't a terrible book, but I will definitely never be picking it up for a reread. It wasn't really to my taste, but I'm not going to tell people not to try it out. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but feel free to give it a try if you're interested, as one of my friends really likes the book. Perhaps it was just me?

Favourite Quotes

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”

“I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.”

Goodbye for now,
Emily Noel