Tag Archives: highly recommended

Winger – Andrew Smith

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It is so much easier for me to read YA books that are geared for girls, but since it’s often the boys who are reluctant readers in my classes, I really make an effort to buy and read books I think might appeal to them. Andrew Smith’s book Winger is one book which has garnered copious praise, and it is definitely a book I can highly recommend to those boys who say they don’t like to read.

Ryan Dean West attends a private school called Pine Mountain in Oregon. He’s in Grade Eleven winger-smitheven though he’s only fourteen. He’s super smart. He’s also a talented artist (many of his drawings, cartoons and graphs are included in this novel) and he’s also a terrific rugby player. His nickname, “Winger”, comes from the position he plays on the team.

But despite a whole list of things in Ryan Dean’s plus column, there’s a few things on the negative side. For one, this year he’s living in Opportunity Hall, O-Hall, where they stuck him “after they caught me hacking a cell phone account so I could make undetected, untraceable free calls.” Living in O-Hall sucks for two reasons: 1. Ryan Dean isn’t living with his two best friends Seanie and J.P. and 2. His new roomie is Chas Becker “a friendless jerk who navigated the seas of high school with his rudder fixed on a steady course of intimidation and cruelty.”

The one thing in Ryan West’s life that is both blessing a curse is Annie Altman.  Annie is also in grade eleven, but she’s sixteen. She’s Ryan Dean’s best friend, but he is also desperately in love with her.

…most people would think there couldn’t possibly be anything between us beyond a noticeable degree of friendship, even if I did think she was smoking hot in an alluring and mature “naughty babysitter” kind of way

This year at Pine Mountain turns out to be a year of firsts for Ryan Dean, but it is also a year when he makes a lot of mistakes. He capitulates to teen pressure and drinks for the first time. He gets into fist fights. He makes out with another guy’s girlfriend. But through it all, he remains self-deprecating. In his words: “I am such a loser.”

Ryan Dean is just one of the many lovely things about Smith’s book. I am not a fourteen-year-old-boy, nor have I ever been, but Ryan Dean’s voice feels authentic to me. He is constantly walking that fine line between making a smart choice and doing something he knows he shouldn’t. His narrative is filled with inappropriate talk about sex (just about every girl/woman he encounters makes his acute sexual radar) and expletives which he only ever uses “in writing, and occasionally in silent prayer.”

Winger is filled with laugh-out-loud moments — mostly due to inappropriate sex-talk– but also really lovely moments between Annie and Ryan Dean and Ryan Dean and Joey, another guy on the rugby team who also happens to be gay.

You couldn’t pay me to be a teenager today. But spending time with them is always a delight, even when they break my heart.

Highly recommended.

The Last September – Nina de Gramont

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Brett loves Charlie. He’s the older brother of lastsepther best friend, Eli. She and Eli are students in Colorado and one stormy night they attend a party and Charlie is there, too, his flight delayed because of the storm.

That day, the first day I ever saw him, he had three days’ worth of stubble. He wore a thin black thread around his neck, beaded with a smooth lapis stone that matched the color of his eyes.  When I looked at him, his lips slid up at the corners. My heart lurched. I don’t know why. It lurched toward him and refused – stubbornly – to ever lurch away.

Nina De Gramont’s book The Last September takes zero time to hook you by the throat and it doesn’t let you go until the very end. I really couldn’t put this book down. On the surface it’s a love story. But it’s a love story that goes horribly wrong because by the end of the first sentence we learn that Charlie is dead. Brett tells us “Because I am a student of literature, I will start my story on the day Charlie died. In other words, I’m beginning in the middle.” By the end of the first page we’ll know that Charlie has been murdered.

Their love story unfolds in flashback. When the novel opens, Charlie, Brett and their toddler daughter, Sarah, are living in Charlie’s family cottage at Cape Cod Bay. Brett is finishing her PhD dissertation; Charlie is doing odd jobs.  On this particular day, Brett is frustrated with Charlie, a feeling not at all out of place in most marriages. When Charlie mentions that Eli had called and that he wanted to come for a visit, Brett is reluctant to see her old friend because “the last time we saw Charlie’s brother he’d dropped an enormous amount of weight and begun scribbling notes on his jeans and forearms.”

I have guilty reading pleasure buttons and, I have to say, The Last September hit every single one of them. Angsty love affair. Check. Unbearable suspense. Check. Heartbreak. Check. Check.

What happened to Eli? What happened to Charlie? What happens when Ladd, Brett’s former fiancé arrives back in town? If this sounds suspiciously like Peyton Place, you’re not wrong. But, omg, The Last September is so much fun to read. The writing is luminous and so even when I didn’t 100% buy the plot twists, it didn’t matter because I just wanted to find out what had happened to Charlie and I wanted to know that Brett was going to survive the grief.

Highly recommended.

 

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

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It took me four reads before I finally fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American novel, The Great Gatsby. I might not have ever read it again after the last time (a couple years ago my book club had a ‘year of classics’) had it not been for the fact that I am teaching grade twelve this year. Often referred to as the quintessential American novel, its place in literary canon is certainly undeniable, but I just never bought in. The Great Gatsby  is my daughter Mallory’s favourite novel and she was understandably flummoxed as to why her English teacher geek of a mother never really liked the book. Now we’re on the same page. If you believe that a classic is a book that never runs out of things to say, this book certainly qualifies. I guess I’m just late to the party.

how-whimsical-2006-great-gatsby-book-coverNick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, moves from the mid-west to Long Island’s West Egg to take a job on Wall Street. Across the bay in East Egg lives his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, an old Yale classmate of Nick’s, a man so “enormously wealthy” he’d brought  “down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.”  Nick comments “It was hard to imagine that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.”

Despite their wealth, Daisy and Tom don’t seem particularly happy and on his first visit with them Nick discovers that Tom is having an affair.  When it comes to the Buchanans, all that glitters is not gold.

Next door to Nick’s little house, and directly across the bay from the Buchanans,  lives Gatsby. His mansion is “a colossal affair by any standard.” Gatsby throws lavish parties every weekend  – huge glittering affairs attended by the who’s who of New York and “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”  On the first night Nick attends a party at Gatsby’s he is “one of the few guests who had actually been invited.” Soon after meeting his charming and enigmatic host, Nick finds himself drawn into a compelling love affair between Daisy and Gatsby, a love affair that had actually begun five years earlier.

The Great Gatsby operates on two very distinct levels: as a love story and a social commentary on the decadence and decay at the heart of the American Dream.

Gatsby’s single-minded devotion to Daisy, his desire to wipe out the present and reclaim their shared past drives him to create a sort of fantasy life. Everything Gatsby does is for Daisy and Nick remarks on his “extraordinary gift for hope,” his “romantic readiness such as I have never found in another person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” But Nick also acknowledges that perhaps Gatsby wants “too much” of Daisy and cautions him  that “You can’t repeat the past.”

On another level, Fitzgerald’s novel captures the glittery, frenetic 20s. A generation of young men had returned from the Great War, Wall Street was booming and in Fitzgerald’s version, anyway, people cared about little else except having fun.   Underneath the façade, though, there is rot and corruption. No one works except for Nick. They just drink and laze about. Nick sees it and when the veil is pulled back he tells Gatsby, “They’re a rotten crowd….You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

The Great Gatsby is a beautiful novel, I see that now. I am sorry it took so long to believe in the dream.

 

 

 

To Be Sung Underwater – Tom McNeal

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Judith Toomey’s life “swerved” (her word) when she was forty-four. At the time she is a  Los Angeles film editor, married to a successful banker, Malcolm, and mother to a teenage daughter, Camille. Life is okay. Sometimes better than okay.underwater

…there were  whole hours and even days when Judith was visited by a dull ace that in spite of its unspecific origin seemed symptomatic of yearning, but there were also whole hours and days of productivity, good cheer, and reasonable warm fellow-feeling that she presumed she should, to be fair about it, call happiness, or something within inches of it.

But then one day, the “bird’s-eye maple bedroom set, handed down to Judith’s father by his grandparents, and by Judith’s father to Judith, and by Judith to Camille” ends up in a heap by the pool, ready to be collected and disposed of, and something in Judith unfolds, “a slow blossoming of resentment.”

To Be Sung Underwater is the story of a woman who suddenly finds herself in a life she doesn’t understand anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t love Malcolm or Camille, it’s just that a choice she’d made twenty-seven years earlier is something she can no longer ignore. Instead of allowing the furniture to be taken to the dump, Judith rents a storage facility and recreates her teenage bedroom. The space becomes an oasis for Judith –  a place where she can dream and sleep and remember.

And what Judith remembers is her time living with her father in Nebraska. Judith’s parents are separated because, as her father says “Our marriage, like all marriages, was happy until it wasn’t.” Judith’s mother is a free-spirited woman and her lifestyle irks Judith, so she eventually joins her father, an English professor at a small college. They live a quiet existence, sharing music and literature and stories from her father’s past.

Then, when Judith is sixteen, she meets Willy Blunt. He calls her “dangerous” and “his eyes, reaching in, exerted on Judith what felt like a subtle but actual pull, which alarmed her.” A year later, when they meet again, there is no denying their connection.

To Be Sung Underwater resonated with me in ways I am not sure I will be able to articulate. Judith makes her living piecing frames of film together to make a coherent whole, but the pieces of her own life no longer make sense to her. She wants to go back, but as Thomas Wolfe famously said, “You can’t go home again.” She wants to see Willy, and we know from the prologue that she does.

It has been a long time since he has seen her, a very long time, but he would have known her in a second. A fraction of a second. For a moment he feels he might soon waken from a dream, but for once, at last and after all, it is not a dream.

Reading that again, after having spent a few hours with Judith and Willy, is deeply moving. I loved everything about Willy. I loved his wry sense of humour and his deep and abiding love for Judith. I loved Judith, too. She’s smart and thoughtful; she cares about the past. I loved how McNeal’s book  tapped into the everyday moments that make up a life: eating and reading and sleeping and falling in love.

To Be Sung Underwater magnificently captures that very human impulse to revisit what we have lost and to try, where possible, to make ourselves whole again. This is a beautiful novel and I highly recommend it.

The House at the Edge of the World – Julia Rochester

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Twins Morwenna and Corwin have grown up on the Devon coast with their unhappy parents, John and Valerie, and their paternal grandfather, Matthew. They are eighteen when the novel begins and their father has just fallen off a cliff to his death. Morwenna, the narrator of Julia Rochester’s compelling novel The House at the Edge of the World says “He was pissing into the brine at Brock Tor on his way home from the pub and fell headlong drunk into the spring tide with his flies open.”

house-edge-worldMorwenna draws us into a gothic landscape where people use language with scalpel-like precision and the characters are not particularly sympathetic.

Take Morwenna herself. I can’t remember the last time I read a book with a first-person narrator that I didn’t really like. Morwenna is prickly and often cruel. Her employer that eighteenth summer tells her she is “a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed little smartarse.” He’s not wrong. The only person she seems to even remotely care about is Corwin, her beautiful and enigmatic twin.

After the death of their father, Corwin leaves Thornton and heads to India where he says he is going to “move water.” Morwenna goes to London, first to school and then to a job as a book-binder. It’s incongruous to her personality — the care she takes to make these beautiful hand-crafted books with their embossed leather covers and beautiful end-papers.

Then Morwenna tells us “For seventeen years after my father’s death nothing much happened and then a pigeon flew through my window.” It’s a sign, surely. Corwin comes home and the siblings, again in each other’s orbit, start to pull at the thread of their family history.

Much of this history is captured in the map their grandfather, Matthew, has been painting for as long as they can remember. The map captures both the landscape and the history of their ancestral home and soon becomes an important clue in the mystery of Morwenna’s father’s life and death.

Even more intriguing to me is the relationship between Morwenna and her brother. To say it’s complicated would be the understatement of the year. His arrival back in England after a long absence offers Morwenna only “one last  lazy unspoiled afternoon” before Matthew’s map and their childhood home spills its secrets.

I really liked The House at the Edge of the World. The language is beautiful. There is an element of idioglossia between Morwenna and Corwin.  They are endlessly compelling even if you don’t particularly like them. The same is true for the rest of the characters. Only Valerie, when she finally moves away from Thornton, seems to manage a modicum of happiness.

I am not satisfied with the way I am talking about this novel. Gah! It’s probably because I don’t want to give anything away and I also have all these conflicting emotions about it. So let me just say this:

Highly recommended.

 

 

All The Rage – Courtney Summers

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Courtney Summers is Canadian – let’s just get that out of the way– and I am extra disposed to courtney-summers-all-the-ragelove her because she’s, you know, Canadian. Like Ryan Gosling is Canadian. And ketchup chips. Okay, now I am just putting off talking about All The Rage because reading Summers isn’t like reading other YA writers. She hits you hard right in the solar plexus. Every. Time.

Romy Grey used to be on the inside — until a party  changes everything.  Now she finds herself navigating the shark-infested waters of her high school and her small town, Grebe, where everyone knows everyone and all those everyones are subservient to the Turners — the town sheriff and his business-owner wife.

When Romy wakes up in a ditch, disoriented and with no memory of what’s happened to her, it brings her back to another night when a beautiful boy  — a boy she wanted — rapes her in the back of his pick-up truck.

…how do you get a girl to stop crying?

You cover her mouth.

Romy never tells anyone what this beautiful boy, Kellan Turner (one and the same) did to her. Instead, she pushes the trauma of it as far down inside as she can and protects herself by painting her nails and lips red. But this second incident  — the waking up on the side of the road – starts to unravel Romy. Things are further complicated by the fact that another girl, Penny, is missing. Penny and Romy used to be friends, but are no longer.

There is so much going on in All The Rage. And, frankly, Summers’ timing couldn’t be any better. We live in a world that blames the girl and, regretfully, never really holds the boy accountable. One need only recall the circumstances surrounding the victim in the Brock Turner rape case to realize how inadequate society’s reaction to these horrific events is. (The link will take you to the victim statement, which should be required reading.)  And almost more problematic is the fact that often women don’t stand with women in these cases. Romy finds herself isolated and bullied mercilessly by other girls, which I find incredibly disturbing.

Girls are told what they can and can’t wear — an ongoing issue in every single high school, I am sure — because a visible bra strap or a too-short skirt is clearly an invitation to be assaulted. The victim-blaming is insidious.

It’s all too easy for Romy to be victimized. She was never really part of the gang. Her father was the town drunk. She’s from the wrong side of town. Now everyone blames her for Penny’s disappearance. It’s no wonder that Romy starts to come apart.

At the checkout, it’s just boys at the registers and I can’t stand the idea of them knowing what I wear underneath my shirt. I tell Mom I have a headache, give her my wallet,  and wait in the car while she pays for it all. I wish I didn’t have a body, sometimes.

There are some good things in Romy’s life. She lives with her mother, who is awesome, and her mother’s new boyfriend, Todd – whom I LOVED, btw. He’s one of the good guys. Leon, the cook at the diner where Romy waitresses, genuinely seems to care for her.

All The Rage tackles a difficult subject with respect and tremendous insight. Romy is a beautifully drawn character, fragile and tremendously brave in equal measure. If I wasn’t already a huge fan of Summers’, I certainly would be after reading this book.

Highly recommended.

Also read: Some Girls Are, This Is Not a Test

Vanishing Girls – Lauren Oliver

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Now that I am back at school, it’s time to start reading YA fiction again. I give it a little  break in the summer so that I can tackle my own mammoth tbr pile. I started this year by reading Lauren Oliver’s highly praised book Vanishing Girls. It’s pretty un-put-down-vanishing-girls-jacketable, folks.

Nicole (Nick) and her younger sister, Dara, couldn’t really be more unalike. Nick is the responsible one; Dara is the wild child and for as long as Nick can remember, people have been comparing the sisters.

She’s not as pretty as her younger sister…shyer than her younger sister…not as popular as her younger sister.

But despite their differences, Nick and Dara are close. Dara recalls that they’d spent

practically our whole lives sneaking into each other’s rooms to sleep in the same bed, whisper about our crushes, watch moon patterns on the ceiling and try to pick out different shapes…cut our fingers and let them bleed together so we’d be bonded forever, so we’d be made not just of the same genes but of each other.

Parker is Nick’s best friend – the boy from the neighbourhood who has shared every single milestone in Nick’s life. Then he and Dara hook up and things get awkward. Dara goes off the rails – drinking and doing drugs – and then there’s the car accident.

Oliver has written a novel that is both an exciting page-turner (a young girl goes missing and then Dara disappears and Nick is convinced the two disappearances are somehow connected) and a moving family drama. Nick and Dara’s parents have separated and the accidents adds extra emotional weight to the already damaged family.

The narrative unfolds in dual first-person narratives, through diary entries and police reports and photographs and illustrations. Each sister has her own version of the truth of what happened on the night of the accident and the time-shifting narrative will yield important clues to careful readers, but the truth is that when all is revealed, you’ll probably still be scrambling to figure out how Oliver’s pulled it off.

Oliver is well-known in the YA world. She wrote the popular Delirium series and I have been looking forward to reading her adult novel, Rooms. After reading Vanishing Girls I think I’ll have to move Rooms up my reading list. That’s pretty much the highest praise I can give.

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.