A Disturbingly Beautiful
Title: Delicate Monsters
Author: Stephanie Kuehn
Publisher: St. Martin Griffin
Publication Date: Jun 9th 2015
Page Number: 240 pages
Blurb
From the Morris-Award winning author of Charm & Strange, comes a twisted and haunting tale about three teens uncovering dark secrets and even darker truths about themselves.
When nearly killing a classmate gets seventeen-year-old Sadie Su kicked out of her third boarding school in four years, she returns to her family’s California vineyard estate. Here, she’s meant to stay out of trouble. Here, she’s meant to do a lot of things. But it’s hard. She’s bored. And when Sadie’s bored, the only thing she likes is trouble.
Emerson Tate’s a poor boy living in a rich town, with his widowed mother and strange, haunted little brother. All he wants his senior year is to play basketball and make something happen with the girl of his dreams. That’s why Emerson’s not happy Sadie’s back. An old childhood friend, she knows his worst secrets. The things he longs to forget. The things she won’t ever let him.
Haunted is a good word for fifteen-year-old Miles Tate. Miles can see the future, after all. And he knows his vision of tragic violence at his school will come true, because his visions always do. That’s what he tells the new girl in town. The one who listens to him. The one who recognizes the darkness in his past.
But can Miles stop the violence? Or has the future already been written? Maybe tragedy is his destiny. Maybe it’s all of theirs.
What I Thought
I never thought that this book would be so dark. I also never thought that someone life could be so horrible. I have no idea how a teenager should face fear, despair, anger and everything that made your life suffering,whole in one. This book will made you curious from the beginning. What's wrong with Sadie? What did Emerson do which made he felt so guilty? And what would happen to Miles? The questions continued chapter by chapter. Until suddenly....BAM!!!! You reached the climax! That was the answer of everything! And it probably would torn you up.
In some YA novels, if we found the mistakes of the main characters, the end of the book would lead us to a conclusion: who is most at fault. But in this book, it was hard to find. One bad things was the chain of another. Until I finished it, I can't decided where was the beginning of those things.This book probably won't be everyone's favorite. But trust me, once you finished it, you will craving for more. This is my first Stephanie Kuehn's book. And I believe I would try to find her other works.
Opening Lines
A ropes course was a shitty place for self-discovery. Seventeen-years-old Sadie Su understood she was meant to think otherwise, but 1) she has no interest in introspection and 2) even if she did, what the hell was the point? This loamy godforsaken spot in the Santa Cruz Mountain was a playground for perceived risk only. Nothing here was real. Nothing was transformative.
True change required true danger.