Charm & Strange Review

TITLE Charm & Strange
AUTHOR Stephanie Kuehn
PUBLICATION June 11th 2013 by St. Martin's Griffin
READ May 15, 2013
SOURCE St. Martins Pree via Netgalley for review

When you’ve been kept caged in the dark, it’s impossible to see the forest for the trees. It’s impossible to see anything, really. Not without bars . . .

Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.

He’s part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost.

He’s part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable.

Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present.

Before the sun rises, he’ll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths—that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying.

So, yeah. What the heck did I just read? I have absolutely no idea how to go about reviewing CHARM & STRANGE, it is most definitely strange I just can’t decide if it held any charm. The one thing that is sticking out in my mind right now is that I feel just as confused upon finishing the novel as I felt at the 50% mark of the novel and I’m sure that’s not a good thing. Since I don’t know how to put my thoughts in review form for this one I am just going to talk about what I liked and didn’t like about it.

What I didn’t like: I didn’t like any of the characters in this novel. Everyone that we met incredibly was unlikeable and at no point showed any form of redemption. The main character Drew/Win was someone that I was never able to get a hold of. He seemed like he was a total outcast in his school but then when people were talking to him or about him he had all the signs of being a popular (if feared) athlete in his boarding school. I understand that he was quick to anger and troubled but I would have liked to get more of an idea of what his social status was. No one in his family treated him well at all, well except for his sister Siobhan but we only see her once and it was super weird. There is lots of mention of his mother but we never actually get to experience anything with her she is merely mentioned in passing here and there. There is so much that I want to talk about here but every time I think about how to talk about Win’s family I am taken into spoiler territory and we just can’t have that.

What I really didn’t like with this one is that I have so many questions upon finishing. I feel like everything was wrapped up so quickly and much too neatly and so many strings were just left flailing in the wind. I get why Win was the way that he was, I do, but there were so many little details that were mentioned about his immediate and extended family that were never mentioned again. I was excited at the end when he got to where he was going because I really thought there would be dialogue there that would bring everything together, but there wasn’t. I was left with far too many loose ends for me to look at this as a satisfying read. Had everything tied together more this would have easily been a 5 star read for me but as it stands I just don’t think it held the merit for that.

Did I enjoy reading the novel? Yes, I did. It was an enthralling, fast read that I could not put it down. I loved the ominous tone of it that was maintained expertly throughout but I don’t feel like it went anywhere. The whole book I was waiting for a plot to show up and it somewhat did in the end but there was just too much that happened that just doesn’t fit. I thought that if I sat down and thought about it more and talked to some friends who had read it things would start lining up but it’s just getting me more befuddled so I am going to stop thinking about it. This was a very strange beast indeed, it’s one that I want everyone around me to read because I want to hear everyone’s viewpoint on it. I really wish I felt a bit more conclusive about it and my rating could reflect the fun I had reading it but there are just too many loose threads for me.