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paperclipmagnet 's review for:
Mysterious Skin
by Scott Heim
Heartbreaking, that is really the word I have to use to describe this book. While that seems like a simple way of stating how I feel about it, for a writer to truly create something heartbreaking takes a lot. You have to bring your readers into the world that your character inhabit but keep them at enough of a distance so that they can view the actions of the characters in a greater context and I think that Heim does that amazingly well with this novel.
I saw the film adaptation of this (years ago now) and loved that (can you really say “love” when it comes to subject matter like this?). The book though, adds so much more richness to the story, so much more confusion and uncomfortable-ness. There is this rawness to the writing but at the same time it’s lyrical, especially in the last part of the story, as a reader you are engrossed with this helpless feeling of only being able to be a fly on the wall of this personal moment that these two young men share, unable to understand completely, only able to grasp at the words of what they are saying.
It is haunting and heartbreaking and there is no closure and as much as you want there to be, as much as you want to believe that things will turn out fine for Neil and Brian you feel trapped in those final two sentences of the book. And perhaps that is the only way to understand any of it, to realize how trapped you are in a single moment.
I saw the film adaptation of this (years ago now) and loved that (can you really say “love” when it comes to subject matter like this?). The book though, adds so much more richness to the story, so much more confusion and uncomfortable-ness. There is this rawness to the writing but at the same time it’s lyrical, especially in the last part of the story, as a reader you are engrossed with this helpless feeling of only being able to be a fly on the wall of this personal moment that these two young men share, unable to understand completely, only able to grasp at the words of what they are saying.
It is haunting and heartbreaking and there is no closure and as much as you want there to be, as much as you want to believe that things will turn out fine for Neil and Brian you feel trapped in those final two sentences of the book. And perhaps that is the only way to understand any of it, to realize how trapped you are in a single moment.