Charm & Strange, Stephanie Kuehn

'You're the meanest of all! You're the one who drugged me!' I almost wish I didn't "have" to write this review, because, though this is a flawed book, it's a book that gave me one of the best reading experiences I've had: a thrilling, searing and disturbing little novel that totally hooked me. But... Okay, so I admit, I came to this novel slightly prejudiced. I have grown to absolutely hate the narrative choice of constructing the entire plot around one secret that the protagonist refuses to divulge. Charm & Strange is an incredibly well-written variant on this plot, but it couldn't quite make me overcome my hatred of this deliberately elliptical way of pretending at discussing an issue without discussing it. However, due to Kuehn's incredibly readable "psychological study" of her main characters, this cosiness was, thankfully, almost entirely removed. Still, I wish that Win's big secret had come out a little sooner, because I wanted more. I wanted more of Win's realisations, Win's family - especially his older brother, Keith, who was probably my favourite character in the novel, and his and Drew's dynamic was the undoubted highlight - and the impact of what had actually happened, rather than Kuehn's intriguing and well written but ultimately frustrating writing around these subjects. I enjoyed her crafty and incredibly disciplined tactic of peeling away layers of Win's psyche, but there was a point when it just wasn't enough for me and I wanted more clarity. As a result, I just COULDN'T get hooked to the present ("matter") sections. I found that I was skimming them without intending to, in an attempt to get back to Win's claustrophobic childhood summer at a house in New Hampshire with his large and eerie family. None of the present characters had the emotional pull for me that young Drew (Win's past alter ego) or Keith, Drew's tragic elder brother (who I loved so much that I actually feel like crying when I think a bit about what a book from his perspective would have looked like, I mean, god damn). Because of the tragedy of the "antimatter" sections, the "matter" sections felt like a nowhere near as interesting counterpoint to me. Yet, reading Charm & Strange was a little like having a hole burned in my heart. I wanted to save Drew, and Keith, and Win (Win and Drew are different people - kind of) and I just felt so sad for everybody. The sense of sadness, guilt and intensity that Kuehn projects throughout the novel is unforgettable and incredibly painful. No, it's not without its flaws (to me), but there's no denying that this one promising debut.

Room, Emma Donoghue

3 stars? 2.5? 3.5? 4? 2? It's up to you. I am at a loss. After roughly five months, I've finally finished Room. And, well, this review is going to be a mess, because I have literally never had so many mixed feelings about a novel in all my reading life. Some people call this brilliant, an incredibly moving portrayal of survival, adaptation and the mother-child bond. Others call this a saccharine, exploitative, manipulative little journey, all horrible things packaged up for the Oprah's book club audience (no offence, Oprah viewers). And I...am exactly in the middle. I loved Ma. I love a good mother, I must admit, I'm a total sucker. Good mothers are rare to find in literature - for obvious reasons, writers prefer their mothers emotionally distant if not downright abusive, fraught with terrible back stories, cruel to their offspring, deluded and undermining. I thought Donoghue handled Ma perfectly: she'd been through absolute hell, and she really was doing her best all the way through. Ma is an intensely sympathetic character, and, thankfully, not just because of the horrors she's been through. She adores Jack (when she says to one character, "he is the world to me", you know she absolutely means it, and Donoghue totally earned the intense love that there is between Jack and Ma) and it made me almost tear up a couple of times. Theirs was a really deep relationship from her side, a great centerpiece for the novel, as Ma understandably struggles with being Jack's mother and being her own person. I thought that Donoghue handled the first half, where Jack and Ma are trapped in Room, really, really well. I loved Ma too much to watch her be raped and beaten but, when my Goodreads friends had mentioned the obliqueness with which Donoghue handles the subject, I feared that it would be all very British, where the horrors are shuffled off-screen to allow us to continue with our cosy lives. Thankfully, it wasn't. Donoghue actually does the thing that many people who talk about writing on such icky subjects as rape/murder/abduction claim to do, which is to focus on the emotional aftermath as a substitute for the nasty details. I was also fascinated by the original and surprising way that Donoghue depicts their life in Room, where Jack thinks that nothing is real except what's in Room, they do Physical Education with their very limited furniture, and read The Runaway Bunny over and over. Then...Jack. Okay, warning: here be a minor spoiler that is revealed at exactly 50% of the way on my Kindle. It's [their escape] That's where the novel kind of falters for me, even though it couldn't have either concluded in Room or with their escape. It needed this section but I found it easily the most unconvincing, with a lot of loose ends. For example, Ma's relationship with her own father just sort of tailed off - for a writer that had put so much thought into showing Ma's thought processes and feelings even when Jack himself (who narrates) wasn't aware of them. It seemed weird that Donoghue would forget about, for instance, Ma's father, or never really explore what drove her to do what she did at the 3/4 mark, which sounds stupid, because the poor woman had been through so much, damn it, but I wanted more coherence and specificity about it. As it was, it felt more of a contrivance (!) to separate Jack and his ma. Jack's voice also got pretty irritating in part two. I agree with some reviewers that it might've been more convincing for Jack to be 8-10 rather than five. It's a difficult balancing act and, unlike the wonderful development of Ma through Jack's eyes, Donoghue doesn't quite pull it off. The little guy confuses brought/brung continuously, among other things, and can't understand the most basic idioms (some of which I'm surprised wouldn't come up in the conversations between Jack and Ma in Room), yet comes out with poetic noble-idiot (forgive the phrase) observations on real life, such as: I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit, or: In Room we knowed what everything was called but in the world there's so much, persons don't even know the names. It felt a lot like the Oscar-baity jokes about the noble character who is also challenged, stunted, deprived or childlike in some way but teaches the shallow and materialistic people around them the true meaning of life. Donoghue satirised the way that the media coverage called Jack an angel or a saint, but I thought she really fell into this gross and annoying archetype later in the novel. Also, people have been complimenting Donoghue on her originality and, yes, the first section especially was very, very unique (it's literally just Ma and Jack in a tiny room, and they build an entire world within it, in a way that is interesting, surprising and hopeful), but this gradually slipped away in the second part, which became much more about an unusual child adjusting to a world which seems alien to them, a far duller and less imaginative endeavour. With that said, it comes to a pretty emotional end. My overall impression was of a book that's not perfect, with both extreme highs and eye-rolling lows. Room is an experiment, not one that always works - neither an unqualified success nor failure. I'll say this, though: I wanted Jack and his ma to be happy. I'd like a sequel where they did nothing but go to the beach, eat chocolate and live happily ever after.

You, Caroline Kepnes

Damn you, Caroline Kepnes. I really wanted to give this one 4 stars. It was probably closer to 4.5 for the first 30% or so - I loved it. I loved what a twenty-first century take it was on stalking, I was horribly compelled by Joe's voice, and Kepnes's writing is just fantastic. I crashed through this when I was supposed to be doing my university work like an addict. I was amazed by her skill at pulling off an absolute boat load of pop culture references while seeming true to her character's voice and actually adding something to the book, rather than seeming dated and uncomfortable. The dialogue was dead on and I loved the whole satirical edge on "twenty-somethings today" without seeming obnoxious or patronising. My only complaint at this stage of the novel was that I was personally uncomfortable by some of the black humour. That doesn't mean it wasn't skilful - I just have quite low tolerance for mean spirited black humour. Nevertheless, I found this incredibly promising and well-written -- until I realized that I wasn't actually all that keen on the way the plot developed, particularly from around 60% onwards. Firstly, Joe's luck was staggering. There are six incidents (four of them major) that I can think of where he gets away with his actions not out of ingenuity but sheer blind luck. I really feel guilty for picking holes like this because it's so well-written, damn it, that when I was reading, I sort of went along with it for most of the novel until the final act pushed me over the brink. All writers need to do this to some extent, of course, but looking back on the novel, it seems like the entire plot was comprised of Joe getting into scrapes from following Beck around, and then just happening to wiggle out of them by random coincidence. I didn't mind the fact that he fooled the police in Rhode Island, or I would have minded a lot less, if it hadn't been preceded by Benji's convenient problems, (view spoiler) I could have forgiven all of this, though, because a similar accusation has been levelled at one of my favourite contemporary novels, Gone Girl. Gone Girl sailed by on its unlikelihood because the character work was so fantastic that I hardly noticed, and, though it did not always explain things in the most plausible way, there was a decided effort by Flynn at tying it together. (Although, on another note, this book is really nothing like Gone Girl and I wish everyone would stop comparing every goddamn psychological thriller since 2012 to Gone Girl.) It seemed like Kepnes had her events in place and her ending decided, but couldn't tie the two together, so sort of slopped them together a bit unconvincingly and crosed her fingers. Good (and frequently great) writing papers over the cracks but can't totally hide the implausibilities and holes. Onto the character work. Joe is an incredibly compelling villain protagonist. He really is monstrous, but Kepnes balances it perfectly; he's not too moustache-twirling but I never felt like she was buying into Joe's myths of himself. I was initially impressed with the characterisation of (Guinevere) Beck, Joe's paramour of the moment, an aspiring writer who is also a self-centred flake, likes to be worshipped and may or may not be a bit of a stalker herself. At first, Beck is a woman with the messy parts left in, the ugly parts, and I really respected Kepnes's characterisation of her (and it might sound pathetic, but an attractive woman who masturbates? An acknowledgement that that is actually an acceptable thing?) But, as we started to get a better sense of Beck-the-person, not just Beck-the-Joe-construct, I began to feel wary. Beck, from her first appearance, is all about sex. She wears a jumper without a bra. She exposes her underwear. She flirts with everything, everyone, she goes on Craigslist for daddy-issue sex, even her best friend is a predatory lesbian who gets off to pictures of her. At first, I assumed that this was Joe's stalker-gaze, distorting Beck-the-person but, particularly in the last quarter, we learn some things about Beck that affirm this view of her. She writes sex-crazed stories and, in a final revelation, she is essentially exposed as a slut. I disapprove of that word. I would never use that word in normal conversation, I don't believe in that, but with the revelations that Beck has (view spoiler), it feels like that's the word Kepnes is trying to prompt, to put in my head. I know that Kepnes is a woman herself and I did really like her portrayals of Karen and Beck, and her portrayal of the believable friendship between Beck and her friends, and I at first admired her portrayal of a woman who is not the male fantasy of womanhood, but then, the more we saw of Beck, the more I became suspicious of the fact that she seems like another kind of female stereotype, not the manic pixie dream girl but the narcissistic, manipulative, cheating whore. This, again, would've been fine if Beck had her own voice. When Joe read her psychiatrist's notes, I believed that we might be about to see a Gone Girlish (yes, that book again) twist on the horizon, where, suddenly, Beck gets her own voice and - surprise! - she's just as bad as Joe but not in the pathetic, crawly way that she is, wheedling and seducing and sweet-talking. Or maybe she isn't. Even if she hated Joe, or she really was a manipulative nymphomaniac, or she had to ultimately lose to him, I wanted to see her at least try and match him as his obsession got out of control. I wanted to see her try. I wanted Beck to affirm herself outside of the identity that Joe had made for her, her friends (and the odious Peach) had made for her, Benji had made for her, even her web presence had made for her. But it never came. I'm almost sure that, even though Joe's insidious voice will be stuck with me for a long time, I won't be able to remember very much about Guinevere Beck at all, except that Joe thought he loved her. I also am slightly side-eyeing all you people who are like, "Kepnes made us root for Joe, showing us that it's not stalker=bad, stalked=good!" I mean, what? Yes, Joe is a fascinating character. He's great to read about. I admit that I hated Peach more, because who couldn't hate such a pretentious, arrogant, and controlling person? (And her name is Peach.) Beck might've been hugely flawed (I'll admit that I accidentally spoiled myself for the "revelation" regarding her family so I have a softer view of that than I might've had if I hadn't seen it coming) but Joe is a serial stalker and murderer. There is a line. This is the line. I feel uncomfortable about the readers who "rooted" for Joe because I'm concerned that somebody could buy into this, "I'm only harassing you because I love you and I want to protect you but I also want you to have sex with me as I wish and wear what I like and do what I want at all times, while I am reading your e-mails, hacking your texts and plotting to do away with those who 'mistreat' you (and get in the way of you doing what I want and living out my fantasy of us being together). But, ultimately, and this is the unforgivable sin (I really am starting to sound a bit like Joe himself), it becomes a little stale, and, worst of all, predictable. Beck finds out and things unravel, more or less, how they might be expected to. I particularly hated the fact that her way of trying to get through to Joe is to seduce him again. Beck can be as bad and as ugly inside as Kepnes wanted - I'm not taking my issue with that - I'm taking my issue with the fact that, ultimately, she's boring and tropey by comparison. The opportunities to develop her aren't taken and, when in a crisis, she always does the most predictable and shallow thing. As such, she remains a weak sauce to Joe's main course, and I felt like this bought into some uncomfortable things about the portrayal of violence - physical or emotional - against women in fiction. Don't look at the woman. She's not important. She reacts how women do, she does the things women do, and, ultimately, she can't compete. Look at the man. Look at him. I will, however, Caroline Kepnes, read whatever you write next, because that's how much I love your writing. Even though you sometimes let me down, you deserve me. I know this about you, and I'm only telling you this for your own good. You'll thank me eventually.

Unsung YA

This is basically a master post of all the YA I want more people to read! Even if only from this small corner of the world.

Sophie by Guy Burt

This is one of the most psychologically disturbing novels I've ever read. I'm not sure I'd describe it as YA per se, but Burt's other novels usually are. It flips back between a child and adult POV throughout, so this is usually evened out as YA (for some reason, although it was published in the mid-90s when the label was in flux). I still don't understand half of the things that happened and I would love to discuss this dense, dark, little novel with someone one day. It's pretty damn harrowing, with the most memorable final scene I've ever read.

Sins of the Fathers by Chris Lynch

This is a brilliant, underrated novel, one which deals with what might be seen a lot of average YA themes (institutionalised abuse, uncaring/clueless adults, tight-knit friendship groups on the brink of Big Change), but deals with them in a way that I've never quite seen before. A lot of the major events take place off-screen (or -- page), but this is never frustrating, and it's so funny. I hate this phrase, but it really is a great boy YA, and I can imagine it really rocking with reluctant readers too.

Pieces of Us by Margie Gelbwasser

I don't really understand why this book hasn't made more of a splash. It's very dark, gorgeously and sparsely written. This is one I really would pair with Sins of the Fathers as two of the kind: totally unique. (How's that for an oxymoron, English teachers?) If I described the themes, it would sound like many other YAs that rule the shelves, but Gelbwasser's deeply humane writing and understanding of the relationships between the characters really make this spark.

Fury by Shirley Marr

I don't blame this one for being underrated. After all, it was only published in Australia (why? why?) and I only got a copy thanks to my amazing Goodreads friends, who sent it around between us. It's an amazing fast, thrilling novels of a group of girls who spiral towards horrific violence when one of them is harmed. Why it hasn't got a wider release, I don't understand. The pacing is exquisite, the characters are extremely memorable, and it's so lady-positive.

There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

Rosoff herself is not an unknown author, what with the huge adaptation of How I Live Now and everything, but I want to see this one everywhere. I feel like it's been publicised far more in Britain. It's a genuinely funny, heart-warming novel, and I loved how Rosoff juggled the dark sense of humour with a sense of consequence and empathy. Also, I want an Eck. I'm not kidding. I will do anything for an Eck.

Angry Young Man by Chris Lynch

I felt like I was cheating by including two Lynch novels, but I feel sad that my least favourite of the books of his I've read - Inexcusable - seems to be his biggest hit to date. I love books about brothers (/siblings/family in general), and I dig books about lovable screw ups on the brink of something bad, and I dig books about unusual female characters. So I basically dig this book.

The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs by Jack Gantos

This is a beautifully-written, fantastically-researched gothic/horror-ish/literary...thing. Imagine Psycho (with less blood) meets Shirley Jackson. It's so odd and unexplainable. It's unlike anything I've ever read. It's possible that the incestuous undertones (undertones only) and the taxidermy will be too much for you, and I get that, but when I finished it, I was left just sitting in my room, blinking at this tiny book, amazed that something so twisted could be so well-crafted and unique.