Thank you Bloomsbury Publishing for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
I genuinely am unsure what to rate this book, let alone what to think about this book. I guess I will say 2 stars.
“There are love stories galore, and we all know them. This isn’t that. The story I’m typing is all the dirty parts.”
Goodreads Synopsis
From bestselling, award-winning author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), an eagerly anticipated, gutsy, exciting novel that looks honestly at the erotic lives and impulses of an all-too-typical young man.
Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches in a sketchbook, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters, next to the allure of sex. Let me put it this way, he says, Draw a number line, with zero is, you never think about sex, and ten is, it’s all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex. Cole fantasizes about whomever he’s looking at. He consumes and shares pornography. And he sleeps with a lot of girls–girls who seem to enjoy it at the time and seem to feel bad about it afterwards. Cole is getting a reputation around school–a not quite savory one–which leaves him adrift and hanging out with his best friend. Which is when something startling begins to happen between them–another kind of adventure, unexpected and hot, that might be what he’s been after all this time. And then he meets Grisaille.
My Experience
This is just such an odd book and I didn’t love it. I found there to be no real point to it other than hearing snippets from a horny boys school year. I am a huge fan of Daniel’s Lemony Snicket books, so I was excited to read more of his adult works. I am hoping this is not an indication of how his other adult books are. While there was a smidgen of comedy and I wanted to see how things with Cole ended, this book in the end was not for me. What Daniel Handler does well in this book is capture the inner workings of a guys mind and really makes the reader feel as if we are listening in on something very private. I think this book is one of those books meant for a specific group of people, and that would be high school boys and they may enjoy this a bit more than I did. Otherwise unless you love a detached writing style and lots of sex from a young mans point of view, I’d suggest picking something else up.
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