Summary: Two misfits glom onto each other during the roughest years of their lives, and their relationship unravels over the coming years.
Rating & Recommendation: 4.5/5; recommend for the angsty youth in us all
Review: I think I misjudged this one. It started off very YA and ended very... unexpectedly.
“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
The book is really about having power over others and the difficulty of choosing what’s best for them instead of for yourself. The two main characters orbit around each other, each slowly decaying and looking to the other for wholeness, for help. They’re disturbed. The reader finds their behavior vexing, the characters find their own behavior vexing, and my snap judgment was that these disturbances are NOT normal.
But they are. These are Normal People. Their behavior is normal, within the realm of the expected, based on their circumstances and the information they’re given. Normal is defining yourself by that which is out of your control. Maybe normal is wrong. Maybe normal is broken. It’s a series of selfish moves and miscommunications and the ending had me completely questioning the nature of the book and the author’s purpose.
The writing isn’t special and the structure is a bit bizarre - it’s mostly in present tense and unfolding with huge time gaps. That being said, I definitely feel some kind of way about it now that it’s over. Very conflicted.
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