(1/28/2023)
Feeling a bit crazy as an avid reader of quality books, children’s YA books, history, science, novels—- I love good lit, for all ages. Writing that makes your spirit soar, heart break, your mind blown, magic happen, forgiveness melt you, indignation rise, horror and man’s inhumanity to man result in making me a more compassionate person and hope take flight out of darkness.
This book was taking advantage of a horrible injustice by using a flat, one voice of a child with adult perspective that didn’t work. Taking advantage of a Dickens classic to give it heft that it simply didn’t carry.
Crazy-making trying to find one review that remotely even, didn’t give it 5 stars.
All the light we cannot see, The Nickel Boys (Pulitzer Prize Winners) are just two in which the prose is breathtaking.
Good books have stories that may be heartbreaking, with multi-voices making a rich, multi-textured tapestry that enriches the reader.
What in the world am I missing about this flat single-voiced teenaged-wet-dream (tossed in to titillate?) with the manipulated takeoff of the vicious oxycodone epidemic ?
I simply don’t get the adoration of this book. But realize I’m alone!