The melting snowball effect.

After reading the prologue of this book, I was 100% sure I was going to love it. That is not exactly what ended up happening.

Let me tell you what happens in the prologue, as a sort of illustration: The book opens with this kid on the roof. He’s pretty much an outcast, and he’s been chased up there by his schoolmates. He’s wearing a uniform, so this is a private school, and there are statues of Saints decorating the roof, so it’s Catholic. This kid is a junior, but he’s desperate. The other kids call him Clink, because he’s always carrying around a gym bag full of items that go ‘clink’. He’s currently on the roof because the other kids have just discovered what’s in the bag, and that’s animal specimens in jars. They turn on him pretty quickly, but he fights back, because he’s had it. One kid ends up with a pen stuck through his cheek, one teacher ends up with a concussion, and a janitor who follows him up to the roof gets his fingers lopped off by the closing hatch to the roof. At this point, Clink thinks his life is over. And it was already pretty intolerable before.

Because really what’s happened here is that Clink goes to a school that actively encourages hazing as part of its culture, which sounds all fun and games and yay tradition! in theory, but in practice, it mostly results in everyone taking out their misery on everyone else, attempting to feel less awful about their own shitty lives. And Clink, poor Clink, he was at the bottom of the chain even before he started carrying around his bag of dead specimens. So why does he carry them around? Well, it’s complicated, but it’s also kind of sweet. Clink has issues at home, and one day he found that the school basement had all these specimens, and it turned his stomach. So he’s been taking them home and burying them in the woods behind his house.

But anyway, now he’s on the roof and people are pounding on the door and he’s trapped. And a crowd is gathering on the lawn in front of the school. And he snaps. He starts hurling his specimen jars at the onlookers, and when he runs out of those, he pushes the saint statues off, one by one. Students are hurt. Chaos ensues. The protagonist of the novel (Davidek) also happens to be down below, because he’d been taking a tour of the school in preparation for his attending it as a freshman the next year. He and another 8th grader (Noah Stein) bond over saving a student’s life. Clink is finally brought down off the roof. And that’s the first thirty pages of the book.

It picks up six months later, and unfortunately, never quite hits the same highs again.

The rest of the novel takes place over the course of an entire school year as Davidek, Stein and a chorus of other characters navigate the corrupt and brutal hallways of St. Michael’s Preparatory in Pittsburgh. Right away I was captivated by Breznican’s voice as an author. It was clear and precise, brutally honest yet funny. And it presented a vision of high school that is unlike any I’ve read before. Davidek’s story isn’t so much a coming of age story as it is a spiral down into the realization that life sucks and people suck and you have to accept it or be miserable. But you know, in a funny, bleakly amusing way.

I think for the most part the book succeeded, and the last couple of pages were really affecting. But that prologue really set my expectations for a pretty intense climax that never materializes. I talked in my review of Abhorsen about how that series was just one large snowball, picking up intensity and speed as it went. This book is the opposite. It starts out big and monstrous and speeding towards your face with incredible sass and velocity. And then, as the characters lose their innocence, the snowball gradually melts away, and what you’re left with is adulthood. And it sucks.

“He’d always assumed that as you got older, you became better, that you learned how to be brave, or wise, or do what was best for other people. Now he believed the opposite was true.”

This book was definitely an interesting and entertaining reading experience, and I will probably be picking up any further books by Breznican. I’d even recommend this to anyone intersted in coming of age stories. I just would warn them in advance not to let the prologue set their expectations for the rest of the book, which is more of a character study than anything.

[3.5 stars]