Tag Archives: highly recommended

Bittersweet – Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

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18339743Mabel Dagmar, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s stunning novel Bittersweet is attending an upper-crust East Coast college on a scholarship. Her roommate, Genevra “Ev” Winslow is from an  influential blue blood family. The two girls couldn’t be any more different and yet somehow Mabel finds herself invited to spend the summer at Winloch, the Winslow family compound in Vermont. Mabel has no interest in returning home to Oregon for the summer, so she gratefully agrees even though she has to help Ev prepare Bittersweet, Ev’s personal cottage, for her father’s “inspection”.

“…if we don’t get that little hovel in shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it,” Ev tells Mabel on the train to Vermont.

Winloch is a strange out-of-time place comprised of an assortment of cottages and a communal Dining Hall set around a beautiful lake,  inhabited by Ev’s immediate family including her parents, Birch and Tilde. It’s isolated and idyllic and Mabel is enchanted. This, she decides, is the life she wants.

Her visit to Birch and Tilde’s cottage only reaffirms her admiration:

Upon the honey-colored floor stood antique wood sideboards and a large mahogany table. An exquisite burgundy Oriental rug tied the furniture together, ending before a large fireplace sporting a brass fender and matching andirons. Canapes were arranged in colorful formations upon hand-painted porcelain platters: crab cakes and mini-lobster rolls and demitasses of chilled pea soup.

Even more impressive, the Winslow’s cottage boasts an impressive Van Gogh, “the most beautiful painting I’d ever seen.”

But there is also something slightly sinister about Winloch. For one thing, Ev installs bolts on the bathroom and bedroom door at Bittersweet. Then Mabel meets Indo, Birch’s sister, who enlists Mabel’s help in locating some important documents lost somewhere in the attic of the Dining Hall, claiming she’d been “looking for a friend like [Mabel] for a while.”

Mabel soon finds herself negotiating a landscape of shifting loyalties and strange tensions. It makes for compelling reading, that’s for sure; I couldn’t turn the pages quickly enough.

Although the bulk of Bittersweet takes place during that one summer, Mabel is actually remembering the events from a vantage point many years later. This will, in part,  help explain why Mabel seems older than seventeen. Her own personal history, revealed in tantalizing snippets, will also help the reader understand her motivations. Bittersweet is Shakespearean in its scope.

Highly recommended.

I Let You Go – Clare Mackintosh

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There have been a lot of books in the suspense thriller vein of late and I love them, especialllet you goy in the summer when I just want to give my brain a break from school.  Publishers always want to draw comparisons to Gone Girl, which is the book that perhaps kick-started this newest craze, but I think it’s better to let a book stand on its own bookish merits.

Clare Mackintosh’s novel I Let You Go is definitely top of the thriller heap. I couldn’t put this book down and galloped through it in just a couple of sittings.

In the book’s opening pages, a mother is walking home in the pouring rain with her young son. Just at the road across the street from their home, he lets go of her hand and runs across the street. Out of nowhere, a car comes barreling down the street and hits the boy. From this point on, I Let You Go is a grab-you-by-the-throat suspense thriller that follows Jenna Gray as she goes to the Welsh coast to escape the tragic death and the police detectives, Ray and Kate, who are trying to find the driver behind the wheel.

Jenna’s grief is palpable. “Everything has changed,” she muses. “The instant the car slid across the wet tarmac, my whole life changed.” She stays until she can’t anymore and then, packing only what will fit into her holdall, including a box of treasures from her life, she runs away.

Unable to resist, I open the box and pick up the uppermost photo: a Polaroid taken by a soft-spoken midwife on the day he was born. He is a tiny scrap of pink, barely visible beneath the white hospital blanket.

As a mom, it’s hard to imagine how Jenna will ever survive this tragedy, but survive she must. She finally settles in a tiny tourist town called Penfach, somewhere outside of Swansea. There she rents an isolated, dilapidated cottage and begins the arduous process of overcoming her grief.

In the meantime, Ray and Kate sift through the non-existent evidence, hoping for a break in the case. Mackintosh spent twelve years as a police officer and so these sections are authentic, but don’t weigh the narrative down with unnecessary police jargon. In addition, Ray and Kate – especially Ray – are given interesting personal lives, which add another dimension to the story.

It doesn’t always work, but it does here – Mackintosh pushes the story along and months pass. Jenna starts to make a life for herself; Ray and Kate are taken off the hit and run case because they’ve done all they can do and then all hell breaks loose in a totally WTF fashion. You’ll know what I mean when you get there and from that moment on, it is a breathless race to the book’s conclusion.

LOVED IT!

 

 

 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid

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Um. WTF? So, I saw I’m Thinking of Ending Things at the book store. Sounded good. Bought it. Read it straight through. Listened to author Iain Red talk about it on CBC Radio. You were no help at all, by the way, Iain, so I am going to work on the premise that I know what happened. Kinda. Sorta.

Im+Thinking+of+Ending+ThingsThe unnamed narrator and her boyfriend, Jake, are on their way to visit Jake’s parents for the very first time. Their relationship is new, but already the narrator is “thinking of ending things.”  It’s not that she doesn’t like Jake. They met at a party and she tells us “He wasn’t the first guy I noticed that night. But he was the most interesting.”

On the long, snowy drive to Jake’s family home Reid’s characters exchange awkward conversation about, among other things,  secrets, space, and memory. She remarks, “Part of everything will always be forgettable. No matter how good or remarkable it is. It literally has to be. To be.”

The journey also gives her an opportunity to catalogue her relationship with Jake. She mentions the way he chews, the toothpaste lingering on the corner of his mouth, his “jagged cheekbones.”  The narrator comments that “Individually, we’re both unspectacular.” But that isn’t exactly true.

When the narrator and Jake finally arrive at the family farm, it’s isolated and creepy. A tour of the outbuildings reveals dead lambs “Limp and lifeless, stacked  up outside against the side of the barn.” They visit empty pigpens and the chicken coop before the narrator catches a glimpse of a “gaunt figure, standing, looking down at us.” Don’t go in that house is probably what you’re thinking. You wouldn’t be wrong because from this point on I’m Thinking of Ending Things takes a turn off awkward street onto sinister avenue.

Jake’s parents are strange. His dad is “reserved, borderline standoffish.” Jake’s mom smiles a lot and is wearing “so much makeup I find it unsettling.” Dinner conversation is bizarre. Jake contributes nothing; “I have never seen Jake so singularly focused on his plate of food.”

A surreptitious tour of the house reveals a basement that Jake had claimed was not used, but which the narrator reveals is “not true at all.”  She discovers a disturbing painting and a bookshelf filled with pages and pages of equally disturbing drawings.

And all this would be enough to make your skin crawl, but Reid’s novel is not nearly as straightforward as this. For instance, the narrator has been receiving strange phone calls from someone she refers to as “The Caller.”  When she doesn’t answer, he leaves her strange, cryptic messages: “I feel a little crazy. I’m not lucid” says the first. The narrator also refers to a childhood memory of being watched through her bedroom window. Trying to figure out how these elements play into Reid’s narrative is half the fun of this puzzle of a book. Or half the frustration, depending on how you look at it.

By the novel’s conclusion, I thought I’d figured out what was going on. I actually thought I’d figured it out by page 88. If I’m right, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a trippy, creepy thriller that pushes lots of suspense-thriller boundaries. It also has something to say about  identity and memory. Even if I’m not right – and we’ll never know because, hello – spoilers – it’s still a great book.

Highly recommended.

 

The Girl With All The Gifts – M.R Carey

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Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel) called The Girl With All The Gifts “Heartfelt [and] painfully human.”   Without really knowing I was buying a zombie book, I picked up M.R. Carey’s novel  a few weeks ago  and finally settled down to read it.  I am not a huge fan – or even a fan at all really – of zombies. I am, however, a fan of Joss Whedon, and an endorsement from him is enough for me to read outside of my comfort zone. Zombies, unlike vampires (Joss Whedon’s vampires at any rate), are just not sexy, and while I am still not a fan of zombie novels, I did really like this book.

17235026Melanie is ten. She lives at some sort of army base, dubbed ‘Hotel Echo’ in an area of the U.K. known as region 6. The base is about thirty miles north of London, and just beyond that is Beacon. Welcome to life since the Breakdown.

Most of region 6 is clear, but the only thing that keeps it that way is the burn patrols, with their frags and fireballs. This is what the base is for, Melanie is pretty sure. It sends out burn patrols, to clear away the hungries.

Melanie is not an ordinary girl. For one thing, she is kept locked in a cell. For another, she and the other children at Hotel Echo exist on a diet of grubs.  Every morning, she is strapped, wrists, ankles and neck, into a chair and taken, along with the other children,  to the classroom where their teacher – usually Helen Justineau – teaches them. Those are Melanie’s favourite days because when Miss Justineau is teaching “the day is full of amazing things.” The children learn math and spelling; sometimes they are read to. Melanie is keen to learn as much as she can, but it’s difficult to know just what the lessons are for because as Mr. Whitaker (another one of the teachers) explains “None of this stuff matters anymore…it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! There’s nothing out there any more. Not a damn thing. The population of Birmingham is zero.”

Dr. Caldwell also lives at Hotel Echo. She’s busily working on a cure for the infection that causes people to become ‘hungries’ (and you’d be right in thinking that what they’re hungry for is humans). She sees the children as test subjects, nothing more. Helen Justineau strenuously disagrees with Caldwell’s methods and the relationship between the two women is fraught with ethical disharmony.

When Hotel Echo is attacked by junkers (violent scavengers taking advantage of the chaotic state of the world) Justineau, Caldwell and Melanie end up on the run with two soldiers, Parks and Gallagher.

I don’t really have a frame of reference for a zombie apocalypse book. I don’t watch The Walking Dead, which I have been told is really good, but really gory. I read and loved Courtney Summers’ This Is Not a Test, but despite the fact that it’s a zombie novel it is zombie-lite compared to The Girl With All The Gifts. So I don’t have any preconceived zombie notions, not like when I read vampire fiction and get all annoyed when they sparkle.

But make no mistake, The Girl With All The Gifts is more than a zombie novel. It’s a novel that asks us to consider what makes us human and whether or not we can be more than our nature allows. Caldwell views Melanie as a test subject, someone with the biological potential to save the world. Justineau views Melanie as a little girl. Parks views Melanie as a monster. They are all right. And wrong. The journey they take together will horrify and break the hearts of any reader prepared to go with them.

Highly recommended.

Read it before the movie comes out!

 

 

 

The Paris Wife – Paula McLain

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I wouldn’t consider myself an Ernest Hemingway fan by any stretch. Perhaps I read him when I was too young to appreciate his spare and muscular prose. For some reason I always thought of him as a misogynist, although I couldn’t say how I came to that conclusion. He has been criticized for his portrayal of women in his work, so my opinion has clearly been borrowed from something else I’ve read. I do know, however, that he is a significant figure in American literature even if neither the man nor the myth was all that interesting to me as a reader.

parisNow, after reading Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife I have to admit to being quite curious about Hemingway and his writing. I think I might come at it a little differently now compared to the way I approached him as a young university student.

The Paris Wife is a fictional account of the relationship between a young Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. The pair meet through mutual friends in Chicago in 1920. “The very first thing he does,” Hadley says, “is fix me with those wonderfully brown eyes…”

Hadley is 28 and has come to Chicago from St. Louis after the death of her mother. Hemingway is just 20 and “seemed to do happiness all the way up and through. There wasn’t any fear in him…just intensity and aliveness.” For Hadley, who says that her life was “stuck” long before her mother’s death, Hemingway is a revelation. When Hemingway announces that he intends on being an important writer, Hadley remarks “I thought poets were quiet and shrinking and afraid of sunlight.” Hemingway is a force and Hadley has no choice but to be swept along with him.

After Hadley returns to St. Louis, the two begin a correspondence which ends in a wedding proposal.  Once they are married, the two return to Chicago briefly before setting sail for Paris. Why Paris? Sherwood

Hadley and Ernest on their wedding day Sept 3, 1921.

Hadley and Ernest on their wedding day Sept 3, 1921.

Anderson (author of the book Winesburg, Ohio, which I’ve never heard of but apparently both the writer and the book were a big deal back in the day) tells Hemingway “…if you want to do any serious work, Paris is the place to be. That’s where the real writers are now.”

Anderson was right, of course. Paris in the 20’s was a mecca for writers and artists, a literary (and artistic) who’s who. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald,  and Archibald MacLeish are just a few of the celebs who enter the Hemingways’ orbit once they find themselves in the City of Light at the end of 1921. This collection of literati came to be known as “The Lost Generation,” a term coined by Stein but made popular in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. The term refers to those who came of age after the First Word War.

McLain’s novel does an exceptional job of capturing the literary scene of the time – its parties and squabbles, jealousies and intrigues – but also the relationship between Ernest and Hadley. There is no question they loved each other deeply and in Hemingway’s own memoir about his time in Paris, A Moveable Feast, he writes “I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her.”

I may have to rethink my position on Hemingway. I may have to read A Moveable Feast. I certainly recommend The Paris Wife especially if you love literary name dropping and Paris. Even if you don’t love those things, McLain’s novel is a delight.

And We Stay – Jenny Hubbard

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Sixteen-year-old Emily Beam, the protagonist in Jenny Hubbard’s YA novel And We Stay,  has been whisked away from her home town to attend a boarding school in Massachusetts. It’s midway through Emily’s junior year, an odd time for a student to be starting at The Amherst School for Girls.  Emily just wants to be left alone, though, and she keeps her head down and her cards close to her chest.  It’s clear that she’s suffered some sort of trauma and her parents have decided she will not be returning to her old school to “deal with the whispers and stares and, of course, the memories.”

andwestay

Emily settles into life at Amherst as best she can. Her roommate, K.T. is friendly and not too nosey and that’s good because Emily isn’t willing to talk about her life. The most she is willing to divulge is that she’s come from Boston – which isn’t exactly true.

Although she doesn’t want to talk about why she’s started school half way through the year, her story is revealed to the reader in short order: her boyfriend, Paul, has died. The details of his death are revealed through flashbacks and the poetry Emily begins to write, in part, inspired by Emily Dickinson. As it turns out, Dickinson had been a student at Amherst one hundred years before.

Hubbard is clearly a poet. Poetry figured in her first YA novel, Paper Covers Rock, a book I really loved, too. In And We Stay, Emily uses her poetry as a way to try and make sense of the senseless. In her poem “Ashes” she writes:

The same sky that once

held her dreams has stolen

her story. And the stars

will know just

how to tell it:

night after night

over and over.

Slowly, Emily opens herself up to the possibility of recovery and healing, but the journey is not without its difficulties. Hubbard negotiates Emily’s journey with a keen sense of the teenage heart.  Perhaps one might view Emily Dickinson as a plot device, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Poetry is the art of heightened emotion, of making the unknowable knowable and Emily is trying to do just that: make a horrific act something that she can survive – because she can. Because she must.

And We Stay is all the things I want my YA books to be: beautifully written, smart and engaging, emotionally intelligent and a page-turner. The book won several awards and is, in my opinion, deserving of them all.

Highly recommended.

Night School – C.J. Daugherty

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Over 400 pages and I read them all lickety-split. C.J. Daugherty’s YA novel Night School is so much fun! Even when I discovered – about half way in – that the book is the first in a series (and you know how I feel about series), even then…I had to keep reading. (I don’t really have anything personal against series. It’s just that it’s such a commitment of reading time and that’s in short supply in my reading world. Still, as soon as I finished the book, I had to go online to see whether the sequel(s) was out. Um. There are four more books, people!)

Sixteen-year-old Allie Sheridan is always in trouble these days. She used to be a good kid, but then her older brother, Christopher, disappeared under extremely mysterious circumstances, and Allie’s been hanging with losers, defacing school property and just generally getting into trouble ever since. Finally her parents can’t take it anymore and decide to send her to Cimmeria Academy, an elite private school in the middle of the English countryside.

Night_SchoolThere – cut off from the outside world (no technology allowed) – she meets Isabelle, the school’s headmistress, and a cast of intriguing teenagers, among them Sylvain, gorgeous and French; Katie, the snotty rich girl; down-to-earth, Jo and Carter West, he of the endless brown eyes and bad reputation. They are all staying on at Cimmeria for the summer term. (School breaks up about mid-July in England and then goes back after Labour Day, early September…so about a six week break.)

Allie soon falls into the school’s rhythms and discovers that she kind of likes it at Cimmeria. Jo is nice and Sylvain is paying special attention to her. The food is great and the school is beautiful.  What’s not to like?

Well, first of all there’s ‘Night School’, but like ‘fight club’ – you’re not supposed to talk about it.

Students in certain advanced areas of study take part in Night School to prepare them for life after Cimmeria so you will sometimes hear them working late in the evening. Only very few select students are offered this opportunity; if you are not among them, you must not attempt to interfere with or observe Night School, and the fourth floor of the class-room wing is off limits.

Then there’s the woods though, according to Jo,  “we don’t actually do much in the woods, and they kind of discourage it because of, I dunno, health and safety or something.”  Then there’s Carter’s cryptic warning: “You haven’t been at Cimmeria long enough to understand how things are here. So be careful, okay? Things are not what they seem. People aren’t always who they seem to be.”

And I still had 200 pages to go!

There are creepy moments aplenty in Night School. Intrigue galore. And even if the payoff isn’t quite there, there’s more than enough to keep readers turning the pages. I would definitely be interested in reading the next book in the series, Legacy, to see how Allie makes out.

My only other niggle is that the characters don’t sound British. The occasional ‘blimey’ thrown into their dialogue does not a British accent make. They sounded decidedly American to me, which stands to reason: Daugherty is from New Orleans, though she now lives in England. That’s a small thing, though, and in no way undermined my overall reading experience.

Fun, fun, fun!

The Replacement – Brenna Yovanoff

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Brenna Yovanoff’s YA novel The Replacement is quite unlike anything I have read before, which is a good thing. It was well-reviewed when it debuted in 2010 and I have been wanting to read it for a while. I was particularly intrigued by the cover, which is creepy, although I try not to chose books based on their cover alone – that has lead me down a few crap book paths.

Gentry isn’t like other places and Mackie isn’t like other 16-year-olds. He’s a replacement,  left in the crib of a human baby who was spirited away by the strange inhabitants of the the labyrinthine world beneath Gentry.

7507908Mackie lives with his older sister, Emma and his parents. He has a best friend, Roswell. He has a crush on a pretty girl, Alice. But he also can’t abide blood. Or get close to anything made of stainless steel. Or go to church, even though his father is a preacher.

Mackie knows he is different. “I dream of fields,” he says, “dark tunnels, but nothing is clear. I dream that a dark shape puts me in the crib, puts a hand over my mouth, and whispers in my ear. Shh, it says. And, Wait. “

The way his sister tells it, someone took her real brother in the middle of the night when she was four years old.

When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother.

When the little sister of Mackie’s classmate, Tate,  goes missing, Mackie is forced to confront his own origin story and this leads him the The House of Mayhem and The Morrigan, a girl who rules there and whose “jagged teeth and tiny size made her seem more implausible, more impossible than all the rest.” All the rest of what, you might ask? Yeah, that would be the living dead girls. The Morrigan  tells him “We were so pleased that you survived childhood. Castoffs generally don’t.”

When Tate asks for Mackie’s help, he is reluctant; he’s got his own problems. But when The Morrigan offers to help Mackie feel better even he can’t resist. There is a strange barter system between Mayhem and Gentry: Mayhem thrives on adulation. But Mayhem isn’t the only world beneath the town. The Morrigan has a sister, and she thrives on blood sacrifice.

Mackie doesn’t fit in, but  whether or not Yovanoff meant for his journey to be a metaphor (like Joss Whedon’s monsters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) hardly matters because The Replacement is a thrill ride.

Great book.

The Book of You – Claire Kendal

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You know how sometimes you start a book and you just can’t put it down – that’s what happened when I started reading Claire Kendal’s debut novel The Book of You. I mean, it’s not an original story – woman sleeps with guy after a bad break up and guy turns out to be a psychopathic stalker – but Kendal’s novel had an extra layer of creep, plus some interesting things to say about victim-blaming.

Thirty-eight-year-old Clarissa works as an administrator at the university in Bath. Her book of youaffair with Henry, a professor, has recently ended. Rafe also works at the university and has just published a new book on fairy tales and it is at his book launch that Clarissa drinks too much. She hadn’t really wanted to go, but he’d sent her three invitations. Hello, alarm bells.

“It is the night that I make the very big mistake of sleeping with you,” she writes in her journal. She has decided to follow the advice from the literature on stalkers and document everything. Clarissa knows she has to build a case before she can even consider going to the police.

I am trying to piece it all together. I am trying to fill in the gaps. I am trying to recollect the things you did before this morning, when I started to record it all. I don’t want to miss out a single bit of evidence – I can’t afford to. But doing this forces me to relive it. Doing this keeps you with me, which is exactly where I don’t want to be.

Everything about Rafe is skin-crawlingly-creepy.

“It makes me want to scream, the way you say my name all the time,” Clarissa writes. And Rafe has plenty of opportunities to say it. He is everywhere: outside her apartment, lurking at train stations, waiting for her outside the court room where she is on jury duty. He sends her things: chocolates, notes, flowers. He calls and texts her dozens of times. He rallies her friends against her, isolates her further. He makes Clarissa question her own sanity.

If there is a bright spot in Clarissa’s day, it is the time she spends in court, listening to the rather horrific details of a violent drug-related rape. It is here where she meets fellow-juror, Robert, a firefighter who recently lost his wife. As she and Robert become closer, Rafe becomes more aggressive.

The Book of You is an edge-of-your-seat thriller which also happens to be well-written. Clarissa refuses to let herself be a victim, but she is human and doesn’t always make the right choices. I never once thought “What?! Don’t do that!” though – which is certainly due to Kendal’s skill.

It’s a bit graphic, so if that’s not your thing perhaps this isn’t the book for you. However, I couldn’t put it down and highly recommend it.

 

 

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock – Matthew Quick

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forgive meToday is Leonard Peacock’s 18th birthday. It’s also the day he has elected to kill himself – but first he has to kill his former best friend, Asher Beal.  Before he can do that, though, he has some gifts to deliver, gifts he’s wrapped in pink paper and packed in his knapsack along with his grandfather’s P-38 WWII handgun.

I want to give them each something to remember me by. To let them know I really cared about them and I’m sorry I couldn’t be more than I was  – that I couldn’t stick around – and that what’s going to happen today isn’t their fault.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock is a smart, funny, heartbreaking novel by Matthew Quick, perhaps better known for Silver Linings Playbook. I was immediately enchanted by Leonard’s charming, wry and honest narrative – he is immediately believable and sympathetic.

Leonard isn’t your run-of-the-mill teenager. He’s a thinker. He’s also in real emotional distress. It’s no wonder. His father, a former rock star currently on the run from the IRS, and his mother, a fashion designer who lives in NYC with her French boyfriend, are clearly terrible parents.

As Leonard makes his way through his day and we meet the four people he deems worthy of parting gifts, it’s easy to see how lonely and isolated he is.

First there’s Walt, the old man who lives next door. “I met Walt during a blizzard” Leonard tells us in one of the novel’s frequent (and often caustic) footnotes. Leonard’s mother, Linda, had asked him to go “shovel the driveway, even though it was still snowing, because she had to go out to meet another fake designer or some bulimic model.” Walt is an old movie aficionado and soon enough he and Leonard are quoting Bogart and Bacall back and forth at each other.

Then there’s Baback, a kid Leonard has known since grade nine. When Leonard discovers that Baback is an extremely talented violinist, he bribes Baback to let him sit and listen because listening to Baback play is “by far the best part of my day.”

Then there’s Lauren, the home-schooled Christian who hands out pamphlets at the train station. (Sometimes Leonard rides the train into the city, following random adults to see whether there is, in fact, any potential for happiness once you’re out of high school.) That’s where he first sees Lauren and he dreams of kissing her, although they can’t seem to overcome the obstacle in their way: Jesus.

Finally, there’s Herr Silverman, Leonard’s favourite teacher. Herr Silverman encourages his students to think for themselves, a quality Leonard feels is lacking in other faculty members. Also,

There have been days when Herr Silverman was the only person to look me in the eye.

The only person all day long.

It’s a simple thing, but simple things matter.

I’m a teacher; that hit me in the gut.

Leonard goes through his day, hinting at something horrible that happened between him and Asher, the something that necessitates his rash decision to end both their lives. With each gift, he half hopes someone will notice that something is wrong and, thankfully, someone does.

For anyone who has ever felt ‘other’, for anyone who ever considered ending their own life, for anyone who has ever felt neglected, unseen, or desperate, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock is the book for you.

Highly recommended.