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grcwbb's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape
Moderate: Mental illness, Addiction, Alcoholism, Classism, Homophobia, Bullying, Drug abuse, and Toxic friendship
katherineflitsch_'s review
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
On the surface, it’s about kids at boarding school and the rise of an adderall ring and how all of that plus teen hormones and teen cruelty in the landscape of BlackBerries and Facebook all comes to a devastating tragic end. But really, it’s about youth and wanting to fit into the ecosystem you find yourself in and wanting to be happy in general and finding it frustratingly difficult to do either let alone both of those things. And it is beautifully and so honestly written. I loved, obsessed.
This book broke me. I was here for it. So I guess you could say I suffered and I was happy about it. (The occasional Harry Potter references smattered across these pages as should be in a story set in 2008-2010 certainly helped aid that along like little winks and nods.) Objectively this book is written with talent and expertise and verve and pain and honesty and a tremendous amount of feeling. Subjectively I think it hit in many ways, and personally at moments I was not okay, in the way (perhaps massochistically as a reader) you want a book to affect you.
Part of what is so expert about this story’s craft is that it perfectly achieves that narrative goal of the things that happen should be unexpected and yet make perfect sense. And true to that aim, the way these characters act just always fits perfectly. Everything that occurs feels inevitable, and yet I wouldn’t call any of it predictable, not at least in a lame or disappointing or certainly not cheap sense.
The verbosity particularly towards the end is frustrating. And I want to say that it’s a conscious expertness on the part of controlling pace to stretch out the climax, but the equal truth is that it’s simply frustrating to experience, like when someone is telling you a story and you know the good part is a sentence away, but they keep delaying that reveal, talking instead about inconsequential things like visual descriptions of the scene or the historical background etc. Just give it to us!!! You can tell us those asides in the denouement. Stop dancing around the neat unfolding of this story. But I obviously must commend that more than I criticize it, because clearly it made me feel things as any good piece of writing should. Well done, Nash. Point taken.
I love the way even Annabeth, whom foster once described and always seemed to view as perfect beyond flaws, is complicated through the end. And I love the painful frustrating reality of how everything shakes down and how those with particular privilege weather it versus others without who don’t (and how even those of lesser privilege who get caught in the torrent find themselves, for the privilege they do have, washing up on comfortable islands all the same). I love a book like this that talks about privilege in ways that are not high and mighty, instead of those obvious shallow and predictable attempts that are annoyingly self-aware and conspicuously self-satisfied.
Upon finishing:
I nearly started crying reading the last paragraph of the closing author’s note aloud to my roommate hahaha
This book should have a trigger warning about themes of suicide (since it’s not explicitly written into the cover copy), but aside from that dare I say it is perfect.
It is sweeping in feeling like tomorrowx3 but a little bit grungier. It is like a grown-up perks of being a wallflower that nods to a separate peace. It is like mean girls expanded across genders and without the comedic tone that in the movie softens the torturous cruelty of it all.
And it hit me particularly hard personally because of how much I related to foster, and how frighteningly similar our patterns of thinking can often be (and particularly were, for me, in high school and even early college, and sometimes now when thoughts spiral still). And it’s haunting to watch his story play out and realize how closely mine might have resembled it all had just a few (not insignificant, to be fair, but passive on our part) details of initializing circumstance been different.
This book feels real, and it feels painfully beautiful. I’ll close this with a quote (just one of many palpably beautiful lines; every sentence is gorgeously constructed) a quote from the final lines of the book, and the final lines of Foster’s famous final paper: “There are moments like this when I allow myself to see the beauty I’d always foreclosed to myself. Part of me thinks that my ability to see it when I do is inseparable from the pain that I feel, and when I think that, the pain suddenly isn’t so bad. The sun is going to come up in the morning. I really don’t like myself a lot of the time, but sometimes I look back over the words I’ve written on my blog and elsewhere and I kind of smile at my own bullshit. I’ll grow up, and then I will come back to them again. It’s fine. I will be fine. There is a spastic firelight in everything. The trick is knowing how to find it.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
Moderate: Mental illness and Drug abuse
Minor: Rape
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