Odd book, but I remember liking it. ( )

This was a cleverly written and fascinating book; however, it completely failed to grip me.

I've been reading this between books for over a month now, and every time I tell myself I'll just read a chapter of another book and go back. Sadly, there was never any point in this book where I really cared if I kept reading or not.

I did really adore the concept and some of the messages that were conveyed. I think a lot of people who went to my high school would relate to these characters and their coping mechanisms. This sends a powerful message about the stresses that teenagers these days go through.

King's writing is quite evocative, and I felt like every chapter in itself could be a prose poem--in fact, I probably would have adored certain chapters had they stood alone.

I'm not quite sure what just happened (I swear, on Tuesdays I will be seeing helicopters from now on) but I'll be thinking about these characters for a while yer.

If you can't pay attention to anything like me, then don't read this. I really recommend this to anyone who has a strong attention span and the ability to take their time. King's writing is very strong and I admire what she's done here.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

A weird, overly complicated, surrealistic read about a whole host of overly complicated, surrealistic, broken teenagers, putting in time at a school with daily bomb threats and assessment tests. It seems like a bizarre book. It very quickly becomes compulsively readable, almost hypnotic, and very hard hitting in the realistic portrayal of contemporary teen life. A.S. King is a genius at that sort of thing. This book grabs you by the throat and shakes you. You think you're following Alice down the rabbit hole and that it will never resolve. But it does. The mysteries that were never that deeply beneath the surface come to light. The fractured friendship where we turn a blind eye to each other's suffering while trying to support each other turns out to be enough. We keep crawling through it.



**spoiler themes**
Rape. Grief. Death of a child. Bomb scares. School Shootings. The futility of assessment testing. Assault. Insanity. Survival. ( )

I'm not usually one for reviews but I felt need for this particular book to do a review. well a lot of the reviews on here seem to say things like I don't know what this book was about or this was a really weird book, Etc. I enjoyed this book for the fact that it was so surreal and so out there that I could take from it symbolism or metaphors or whatever and it was open to my interpretation therefore this novel became what I needed it to be about and I enjoyed that a lot of the issues were Mysteries or references or not really clarified until the very end of the book ( )

This is brilliant, tapped into a deep level that few books reach. The prose dances between story and poetry, falling usually on the more poetic, less story-driven side. It's a kind of magic realism I haven't read much of, really without a strict form of magic. Things happen because they must not necessarily because of some magical intervention (or logic). That said, I really am not sure who this book is for. Will teens read it? I'd love to be able to see that yes, the appeals to teens. But I'm not sure the poetry of it will appeal. ( )