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Jul 22, 2009 CaliGirlRae rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, audiobooks, best-of-2009-reads, 2010-young-adult-reading-challenge, mindtrip, mental-illness

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Whoa. This was one trippy novel. I'm a huge fan of speculative novels, am new to unreliable narrators and I knew the big twist going in (bad Rae!) but the complexities and overall haunting nature of the story took me by surprise.

As you know from the blurb, Micah is a liar. The book starts out like any other YA with life in high school and everyday living but right off the bat we discover Micah's 'boyfriend's' brutal death which shakes the school. Throughout the story, Micah unravels her life, he Whoa. This was one trippy novel. I'm a huge fan of speculative novels, am new to unreliable narrators and I knew the big twist going in (bad Rae!) but the complexities and overall haunting nature of the story took me by surprise.

As you know from the blurb, Micah is a liar. The book starts out like any other YA with life in high school and everyday living but right off the bat we discover Micah's 'boyfriend's' brutal death which shakes the school. Throughout the story, Micah unravels her life, her family and her connection with Zach's last few days. Although she promises she will tell you, the reader, the complete truth she soon ends up backtracking by switching truth for lies and vice versa.

Looking at the story as a whole and picking up clues here and there, I think the idea of Micah having a mental illness fits. I believed her at first when she described her relationship with Zach but as she revealed more about herself and their relationship, some things didn't quite add up. For instance, she lies about the last time she saw him. She lies about the fact that they slept together. She even lies about the last time she saw him and in what condition. One thing that feels like truth is when she says "I have the feeling that I cared about Zach more than he cared about me". The fact that Micah being Zach's "after hours girlfriend" didn't come out until later is telling because of how obsessed Micah seemed to be with Zach. At first she is shocked then completely numb at his death when it is revealed at school but then later on she believes she describes how she saw his dead, mutilated body in the park. Also the fact that she never really describes who Zach is as a person (his hopes, desires, family life, etc) but gets angry at others who think they know them shows some of her possession to make him hers forever. Everything thing we know of Zach is an idealized version of an object of affection.

Too much of Micah's lies are built on what she _wished_ would have happened but she backtracks to say what really happened. We can see this in how she views her brother, to the kiss between her, Sarah and Tayshawn, to the first time she was in the cave, how much she slept with Zach and even the last time she saw Zach (supposedly in the park but really in the school) which are all idealized versions of the truth.

In the real scenario, I imagine it's like this. Micah was the school outcast who kept to herself and spun lies to make herself interesting to her classmates but Zach, the popular guy, was the one she truly wanted to be with. He's handsome, funny and great at basketball but unfortunately he's already with someone and most likely doesn't return the affection. So Micah imagines she's his girlfriend after hours when no one else is around. They can't keep their hands off each other one moment but they also cuddle and slept next to each without doing anything the next. One day Micah is tired of dreaming and decides to make it a reality. She confronts him to reveal her feelings for him but when he dismisses her advances (perhaps calling her a freak as she describes him calling someone else), she becomes offended ("did Zach think that of me, too?") and then she kills him and mutilates his body to the point that he is unrecognizable (prior evidence shows that Micah has a tendency to act violently when she doesn't receive satisfactory answers or actions).

Think Psycho, only "mother" is a four legged she beast possibly mixed with a homeless kid here.

Micah's werewolf elaboration is just that, a fantasy to cover up the fact that she has a mental illness and is a killer herself. If this were a film, I could easily see it being directed by David Lynch. He excels at showing his films from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator who "likes to tell things their own way, not necessarily the way it happened" (tm Lost Highway). Often times his characters have done something horrific or experienced such a bad life that they create a better fantasy world for themselves, but eventually the real world has a way of yanking them out head first. Micah's crimes from killing her kid brother (as confessed later on and through her elaborate negative descriptions of how she felt toward him), Zach and possibly her science teacher are too horrific for her so she creates this young homeless kid and the werewolf tale. She's a product of being in the middle of everything. Not quite boy or girl. Not quite black or white. And perhaps not quite sane or insane. The narrative keeps jumping back and forth as if two personalities are fighting for attention.

I noticed Micah delighted in the kill 'in wolf form' too much and she felt strangely relieved when the homeless kid wouldn't suffer for his crimes (perhaps a mirror to the trial which didn't convict her but sentenced her to a mental institution). Instead the homeless boy would be cared for as he was left to live with his own kind who understand who he is. It is at this point, Micah is "abandoned" by her parents at the farm, leaving only "the Greats" (her grandparents, great aunts, etc), cousins and the homeless boy. Perhaps this is where she is left off at the mental institute as well, only receiving letters from her parents to which she refuses to respond. The homeless boy mentions how they "belong here" and Micah thinks about how her life is over and she'll never see the city or Tayshawn or Sarah, nor be able to go to college on a scholarship and study biology. She even mentions how _he_ "must be insane" when I think it's a revelation about a part of herself.

Another reader mentioned that the homeless kid was the same age Micah was when she killed her brother. An interesting tidbit I hadn't thought about until now. But it is interesting to note how the boy doesn't know how old he is, where he came from and who his parents are. "I never remember the bad stuff. Only the good stuff," he tells her and the strongest recollections of the narrative focus on the physical intimacies Micah shares with others while situations dealing with darker aspects (the specifications of Zach's death, how her brother died and how "they don't like to talk about it") are glossed over.

At the end of the exchange, Micah also says "it occurs to me that is was not the white boy who was a puppy being abandoned in the woods...it was me" and I think at that point she realizes they may be one and the same person.

If we take Micah's werewolf tale as fact, there are some major things that don't add up. If the homeless kid was real (and a werewolf) and had killed Zach as he confessed, wouldn't there be previous deaths of other werewolf attacks prior to Zach's death? Or perhaps other attacks thereafter? And if so, why weren't the police or media connecting more deaths with animal-like attacks around the city? Won't there be other strays wandering aimlessly killing like this kid? As these aspects don't quite fit with prior knowledge and outside support, I believe it was Micah doing the killings and eventually she ended up in an institution for her crimes. There's a passage later on the book where Micah describes " how dark it is" in an unknown place with no windows before continuing on with her story. This along with the later mention of reporters and a trial lead to that conclusion. I found it funny when she says "I bet you think I'm telling you this story from a padded room" when that's exactly the conclusion I came to.

This is an interesting, if disturbing, peek into a young messed up mind. As a student of psychology, it's fascinating to me because it shows just how far the mind goes before it connects with a coping device that it can comfortably live with. Considering how young Micah's mind is (and possibly how young she was when she started killing at 12) it's especially chilling. Here's an interesting exercise: exchange all the instances of "werewolf" in the text with "killer" the next time you read the book.

Larbalestier is a fabulous writer with a haunting and unsettling narrative here that will stay with me for a while. I'm still on the fence as to how I feel about the book and I'm not sure I'll be rereading it (as I reserve that for entertaining and enlightening reads) but I'm glad I did give a first time read. ...more

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Sep 25, 2010 Christiane rated it it was ok

Shelves: started-but-never-finished

It is a tedious book because the narrator keeps deceiving the reader. It is obvious that in a novel the author develops a lie to the reader, but the reader does not expect to be told that by the narrator every other page. I could not finish the novel because it gets monotonous being told over and over the same fact - the main character is a liar and wants attention upon herself. She could have shortened the novel and made it a novella, and I would have finished it where I was. I felt no compunct ...more

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Jul 31, 2011 Karen Sandler rated it really liked it

A pretty spooky book. It's never quite the story you think it is, nor is the main character, Micah, ever quite the person you think *she* is. A great read. ...more

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