The Quick Cut: A teen girl and guy struggle with their individual lives as they desperately cling to their friendship for help.
A Real Review:
Thank you to Knopf Books for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
We love our happy endings. Something about having all those struggles for the characters, all the pain and pushing through the barriers makes us want to make it mean something. However, life doesn't always wrap up quite so neatly and so when writers give us a bitter taste of reality in tge worlds they create, readers tend to celebrate it.
June has been hiding some very dark secrets from everyone in her life, including her best friend Nick. She's been hearing voices, having a hard time focusing her thoughts, and now she's seeing things that shouldn't be there. Her life has gone from AP classes to barely functional, day to day trying to hold herself together. Unfortunately, the dam breaks and her secrets come loose. What is happening to June and will she ever be the same?
Meanwhile, Nick can't seem to escape the mistakes of his family. Living with his aunt, he helps pay the bills by stealing cars in the same way his father did before he went to jail for it. Can he escape the mistakes of his family and find a better life for himself or is he doomed to repeat the cycle?
June and Nick are an interesting pair because they care so deeply about each other, but its not about romance and they very much live different lives. Each narrates different chapters of the book as they go through their lives (sometimes separate, sometimes together). June imagines life at college with her friend Bethany with hope while Nick remains hopelessly entangled in the garage. Their separate problems are taking them fartger apart from one another and that is only going to get worse.
This story at it's core is about the strength of friendship. Don't be fooled by the narrative: June and Nick both make bad decisions here that hurt themselves enough to cause their predicaments. However, seeing their relationship with one another and how it holds during the events that take place (don't want to ruin that for anyone) is something to see.
That being said, I still had issues with this book. I really hoped for more on June's schizophrenia, but after she starts seeing therapists the insight as to where her mind is and what's happening really drops off. This one is great for seeing the struggle to discover what's wrong, but not the aftermath of the diagnosis. I just hoped for more there.
With a story about friendship, this book provides the insight about choices gone wrong.
My rating: 3 out of 5