A true example of narcissistic parents and physical abuse all in the Young Adult book. This book is an abusive horror, there are so many things that are too close to read and feel comfortable about. It has its own unhealthy dose of ableism and a terrible outlook. Mostly because the parents hate their child and call him deformed. So if you're looking for a book where ableism isn't a factor, it's not here. Everybody who's bad is ableist and a lot of people have horrified and terrified responses to our main characters missing ear.

I won't say this is the worst representation because a lot of people do treat him like a normal person. But you can tell that he is not accepted as normal or treated as normal throughout almost every page of this book.

Every other page of this book has been utter terror. Stick and Bosten are abuse victims. From the description of this book and from the back page summary it doesn't ever come up like you would expect this to. From the outside it's just a brother finding out his brother is gay, from the inside we go into the darkest of abuse. So dark our main characters barely talk about it.

So dark in fact that they start acting weird when one of their relatives treats them right. I don't need to tell you that trapping a child in a room without a bathroom and giving them a bucket that they have to clean out after using, is abuse. I don't need to tell you that slapping your child or forcing them to play with your weird reenactments of a normal family is abuse. And I definitely don't need to talk about how molestation is abuse. And in a lot of ways neither does this book. Because this book doesn't really talk about it, instead, it talks around it. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying this is a bad thing, our perspective is Stick and Stick sees everything as normal.

Stick thinks that smoking too much and drinking too much is normal -within a few pages of the book opening his fantasy goal is to hold a cigarette like his mother does, which is perfectly mastered because she's a big addict to them- that hitting your kids is normal. He believes his treatment is perfectly normal and how will world works. He doesn't realize what narcissistic personality disorder is, or that his father has it.

That's for us, the readers to know.

For them their life is how it's always been and how it always will be. I will say in some ways the lack of telling or even letting us know how far it's gone makes things a little concerning. Not a good way but in the way of I don't know if this is affecting that. For example, the father touches Bosten while drunk and gropes and molests him. Bosten then talks about how he's always known he was gay. And it feels like his father is how he had that realization.

Which is another squick.

It also feels like his father knew all along so his reaction to finding out his son is gay is so weird. Why would he destroy the house and go into a rage when he knew that he was doing stuff to his son at a young age? It feels like it was the idea of being exposed that made him mad, not that his son was gay. But it is utterly confusing because these things all correlate to each other and they're not touched upon.

Our main two characters are still very young teenagers, and it's odd that Bosten knows about sex and stuff unless he learned it from his dad. But then he never elaborates upon it so it's just left there that maybe he's just mimicking the things he was taught which makes it even darker. In a sick twisted way, this makes the book more of a horror than anything else. This is a thrilling horror where we don't know just how bad the abuse has gotten. But we are seeing signs of it in Bosten's own behavior and that's not being addressed as anything other than his behavior.

Also, I got really hung up, on the whole, this is illegal in Washington State sentence, what year is this for it to be illegal for two guys to be gay? I don't think that's ever been a law. Utterly broke my immersion. There's no real year implication and now I'm lost going it wasn't illegal, they were doing things in the early 2000s so this must take place before 2000, but it also doesn't read like it's an 70s or 80s time period.
This is important and I cannot stress how mad it made me to have no idea what year or decade this took place in.
Edit, okay. Apparently despite none of this reading right for the time period, going off the mother's threat to call the police, this is the sixties and seventies.
"Washington repealed its laws that criminalized consensual sodomy in June 1975, effective on July 1, 1976"
Does. Not. Show.

It turns out that the gay boyfriend attempted suicide with scissors which honestly given how dull most American scissors are I highly doubt it was very effective. His mother is horrified and has him committed to a psych ward.

And then Stick leaves. And I'm sure everybody expected it to get better. He's away from his abusive father.

No, this book is a tale of tragedy.

He assumes Bosten's name for an exceedingly short period. A very minor identity crisis.

Almost immediately he runs into somebody who randomly starts and is doing cocaine with a bunch of strangers. They even try to get him to do it, despite the one guy who rented the place knowing he's a child. It gets really nasty and then for some reason while doing coke one of them kills the other five. I find this extremely hard to believe because cocaine doesn't usually result in that kind of behavior, so this just means that he invited a really bad person and gave them cocaine with no pre-knowledge of what it would do. Which is extremely reckless but okay I guess bringing random strangers in and giving them expensive drugs is something that happened to random people that Stick ran into.

Of course, this somehow gets him tied to the murders, but then he gets away and keeps going. He makes it back to his aunt and for some reason, neither parent wants them now. This is extremely bizarre because they both were obsessive over keeping him, and his brother. But now that they both are gone their parents are utterly okay with them staying with their aunt and don't seem to be trying to get a hold of them at all. A bizarre thing that really damaged it. Had that not been in the book it would have been four stars easily because I could have believed that okay cocaine makes people do crazy things, a trucker offers a 14-year-old a ride all the way to his aunt's place, but there's something about the parents not wanting them that destroyed my immersion.

That said Aunt Dahlia is an absolute Mary Poppins, I have no idea how she is related to her sister because they are complete opposites one constantly assaults her son and calls him a freaking mistake and the other is a wonderful person. I think one got humbled and the other one didn't. The dad sending Boston money destroyed this immersion for me. He hated him he attacked him he had no reason to send him money.

I'm not the first to talk about this ending, it's an okay ending it feels like he just goes there, grabs his brother, and brings him home. It's a very odd thing because it goes so swiftly it's within five or seven pages. And yet it was almost half of the book to find him. It's very anti-climatic and it just happens. But I would not want it to be a cliffhanger end ambiguously.

I think the most damaging things at the end of reading this book was the drug portrayal. I skip over it because I don't really want to dwell on it but Boston's arms are covered with needle marks. Enough they can be seen in dim light. He's been injected/ing with unknown drugs and has multiple needle infections. These are all signs of so many things that he could have wrong with him, addiction recovery all of these things are there and never addressed. Which means the needle marks are just for shock value. Bosten should be craving another hit, he should be addicted if he has that many holes in his arm.

Much like the cocaine I find more fault with how Boston is portrayed as a junkie now than anything else. It's a very fear-mongering drug topic. Cocaine doesn't usually make you outright violent, it makes you energetic it makes you do things like habitually clean or become OCD about the state of your house. But cocaine is projected in this book as if it's magic and that one snort of it will make you wildly violent and kill two people. Empty five shots into a boathouse. Likewise, street drugs that are randomly injected into an arm are treated like they have no repercussions or long-term damage. And that's why I ended up at 3 stars.
You just can't portray the stuff as realistic when it feels so wildly out there.

All in all, I would still give this book about 3.5 stars. It's very ablest it feels like it doesn't really resolve the problems, and it ends with an implication that neither one will ever recover from their trauma. They are stuck as they are and there is nothing better ahead for them.

The last line is they are drowning and I was hoping they'd be better once free, not destroyed. It comes across as anti-recovery to me, but I didn't hate the ride.

I hated the second half of the book more for damaging the four to five-star review I had planned than I hated the ride. Those drug portrayals just hit me like how some people think weed makes others act. In reality, the weed portrayal was bad too, but I could ignore that. Research before writing these things, guys. It has a big effect on in-the-know readers. ( )

Review I've been a huge fan of Andrew Smith since I read Ghost Medicine, and I thought I'd read all his books. So it was a surprise to discover this one I'd never heard of before. So I quickly snapped it up for my Kindle and dove right in.

Stark (or Stick as he gets called because of his height) is fourteen and was born missing an ear. Years of bullying about it have made him self-conscious about it so he rarely leaves the house without a hat. His older brother Bosten does his best to protect Stick, but he can't be there all the time. And even if he can stave off the school bullies, there's no way he can keep Stick (and himself) safe from the abuse at home.

Luckily both Bosten and Stick have good friends with families who embrace them - Stick with Emily and Bosten with Paul 'Buck" Buckley. But as they get older, the friendships turn into something more. Stick discovers he likes kissing Emily and when her parents are out of the house, sharing a bath.

When Stick comes across Bosten and Paul kissing in the woods and realizes Bosten is gay, he knows this isn't going to go down well at home. So he keeps Bosten's secret. But Bosten's secret is exposed anyway, and the only way Bosten can stay safe is to leave home.

Unable to feel safe or whole without Bosten, Stick leaves too, unsure where Bosten is, but suspecting he may have gone to their aunt's, the one place they felt loved and accepted for who they are. On the way Stick finds good people who genuinely seem to care about him and his well-being, and others who do terrible things.

Despite the challenges - some of them terrifying - Stick keeps going, certain that he'll find his brother and the safe, loving home he knows he deserves.

I loved this book. Stick was such an endearing character and the relationship between him and Bosten was beautifully realized. It was clear that the pair of them had stuck together through all kinds of indignities and horrors meted out by their parents.

The contrasts between their home with its rules and petty demands and the homes of their friends and most particularly their aunt were well drawn, and Stick's amazement as the differences felt very real.

There are some very obvious parallels between this book and my own Standing Too Close, so that may be why I responded so much to it (and hello, new comp title!)

But that aside, this is a powerfully emotional story with a spunky central character with a raw, real voice. I definitely recommend it. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. This is the kind of teen/young adult writing I enjoy. It has real substance. Two teenage boys look out for each other because their home life is abusive and they are constantly walking on eggshells around their parents. The brothers have a great relationship. The younger brother was born with a physical deformity and is sometimes the subject of bullying, but the real terror in their life comes from home. The boys have a couple of close friends they also rely on, but, like many people who suffer from abuse, they keep the secrets of their family instead of reaching out for help. That's not the only secret the older brother is keeping. He is also gay and knows that's a secret he also can't tell. This is a great story of brothership, love, intolerance, acceptance. The book was published in 2011, but I couldn't tell when the story was supposed to be set. It sometimes felt like the 1960s or the 1980s - like it was before cell phones or the internet. It didn't detract from the story, but it left me wondering. ( )

Definitely older teen - graphic language, sexual content ( )

Enjoyed this. Even though the plot got pretty far-fetched at times, I was really attached to the characters. ( )