Charles Benoit

This short, grim young adult novel is about a boy who has been brought up without love or respect, with tragic results.

Much like Before I Fall, the book starts at the end of the story with the death of the main character, and works backwards to tell you what happened and why. It’s also told in second-person omniscient narration (in which the narrator tells the story by addressing the protagonist as “You”) which adds a unique tone to the book.

Kyle Chase has grown up with cold, critical show more parents and basically no real friends as he starts tenth grade. Of the two people he thought actually liked him, both were using him and had no real interest in him at all. In fact, Zach has “selected” Kyle as a “friend” precisely because of his apparent loneliness and neediness. Ashley is as vapid as they come and Zach is, horrifyingly, a psychopath.

Evaluation: Benoit, a former high school teacher, is as good as it gets when it comes to putting his finger on the teenage mind and teen vocabulary. I felt so sad for Kyle. He was full of anger and hurt over his home life, didn’t fit in well at school, and his teachers were uninspiring and devoid of understanding. Zach convinces Kyle that the bad things that have happened to him are a result of his own choices. One can’t help but feel, however, that Kyle was pushed into bad decisions by ending up a sensitive boy with potential in a world that could not be bothered with him. This intriguing book takes you to a dark place, and yet I was glad I read it. I would recommend it as a cautionary tale. show less

This book is very well written, which only makes it that much harder to read because it makes all the horrible things that happen more believable. I was eagerly anticipating this book, but for some reason I wasn't prepared for it to be so brutal. Must be all those Disney happy endings - I still think everything will be okay in the end, even when the first page of the book tells you it won't. I wanted to stop it all from happening - and some characters I just wanted to pick up and shake until show more they stopped being jerks - most of them, actually. I only gave it two stars because I can't be really enthusiastic about something so cruel and sad, but it's a good book. Just be prepared for it to freak you out. show less

Initially I picked up this book because I’d heard buzz that it was brilliant… but I had no clue what it was really about. Basically all I knew was that it was written in second person. I’ve read very few books in second person – I think all the others I’ve read have been epistolary novels – so this intrigued me.
However, as I read, I found myself bothered by the tense. I kept trying to figure out who was narrating. Was it a teacher? A cop? (Notice I didn’t wonder if it was a show more friend or another student? There were times when comments were made that made me feel like it was an adult telling the story, not a teenager.) It drove me crazy not knowing! It started to feel like nothing more than a gimmick (albeit a good one, since it’s a big reason I picked up the book). But I pressed on, genuinely interested in where Kyle’s story was heading.
Kyle is an ordinary teenager – he gets by in class, but doesn’t excel. He’s got friends, but not close friends. He’s been in fights, but doesn’t seek them out. He’s got a crush on a girl in class, but he can’t work up the nerve to ask her out. Then Zack, the new kid, notices Kyle and invites him into a world unlike the one he knows. Zack is offbeat and as much as he annoys Kyle, he also fascinates him. The fact that Kyle is just this average guy made it easy to see why he made the choices he did, even when they weren’t necessarily good ones.
Despite my problems with the tense, when I finished the book it all made sense. I couldn’t imagine anything but a second person narrative working for the overall story. This is one of those books that, though I enjoyed it as I read it and thought it was great when I finished it, as I processed it later that night (and for days afterward) I liked it even more. I’ll add my vote for this being a brilliant book! show less

Teen fiction; high school pressures for boys. This book propels you along nicely, giving glimpses of past indiscretions and trouble to come, and then when you get to the end you think, that's all? THAT is the whole reason for this whole plot? True, it may not be small potatoes to the main character, but it's pretty anticlimactic and dumb, especially since he's not even particularly that good of a friend to the girl in question. I can deal with the hero not being much of a hero, and I I liked show more the development of the characters with all the shifty-ness and shadiness, but it was a story I could easily have done without. Also, it makes me really sorry for this boy's mom--you can tell she's trying to help him, she can't help that she asks all the wrong questions and that he's going to ignore her anyway. show less