When I Am Through With You - Stephanie Kuehn


“This isn’t meant to be a confession. Not in any spiritual sense of the word. Yes, I’m in jail at the moment. I imagine I’ll be here for a long time, considering. But I’m not writing this down for absolution and I’m not seeking forgiveness, not even from myself. Because I’m not sorry for what I did to Rose. I’m just not. Not for any of it.”

Ben Gibson is many things, but he’s not sorry and he’s not a liar. He will tell you exactly about what happened on what started as a simple school camping trip in the mountains. About who lived and who died. About who killed and who had the best of intentions. But he’s going to tell you in his own time. Because after what happened on that mountain, time is the one thing he has plenty of.
I couldn't put this one down. I rarely can with Kuehn's work. I first became enthralled with her work when I read Charm & Strange and later, Complicit. Kuehn knows how to build tension and make readers guess, and she certainly doesn't shy away from material that some might consider controversial. As a researcher and psychologist, much of Kuehn's work looks at motivation, mental illness, and trauma, and When I Am Through With You is no exception.

Told through Ben Gibson's point of view and written as a journal while he sits in a juvenile detention facility, the novel explores what happens when a group of students and their teacher end up on a mountain climbing excursion, only to have everything fall apart when rumors of a hidden half-million dollars begin to circulate and one of the students, Archie, becomes obsessed with finding it, even if it means chaos and maybe even death.

At the same time, Ben is dealing with migraines brought on from a very traumatic experiences in his early years, after he shot his father and ended up in a car accident with his mother. His relationship with Rose seems to be slipping, though he's not sure why. As I noted earlier, Kuehn's work often explores motivation and what causes people to do the things they do, whether that be going on a hiking trip in the first place, or cheating on someone, or perhaps even shooting someone.

This book is packed with intrigue, mystery, danger, and hidden intentions. Everyone is guilty of something but nobody seems to want to admit anything either. Because the story is written as a journal, there is also the possibility of unreliability where Ben's narration is concerned. Readers who like a tidy ending might not be great fans of this one, but I think it's a fascinating story, and I definitely Recommend it!

(NOTE: This review is from an Advance Reading Copy - Out August 2017)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Living - Matt De La Peña

Image
The Living  recently received an Honor from the Pura Belpré committee. The award recognizes of a work which best portrays the Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth. As I was at the awards announcements, and having known people who served on the committee in the past, I was intrigued. I had read the winning title and the other honor titles, and was impressed with the choices. So here's my review of The Living : The novel begins with Shy, a young guy working for a snazzy cruise line, offering water to people on the Lido Deck of the ship to combat the heat. Everything is going pretty well until an older gentleman comes out and starts spouting of weird, disconcerting phrases: "You have seen the face of evil."Shy doesn't quite know what to think, so he moves on to a couple of ladies on the other side of the deck. Just as he's handing them their water bottles, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and realizes the old guy h...
Read more

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

Image
Max: Chill. Sports. Video games. Gay and not a big deal, not to him, not to his mom, not to his buddies. And a secret: An encounter with an older kid that makes it hard to breathe, one that he doesn't want to think about, ever. Jordan: The opposite of chill. Poetry. His "wives" and the Chandler Mall. Never been kissed and searching for Mr. Right, who probably won't like him anyway. And a secret: A spiraling out of control mother, and the knowledge that he's the only one who can keep the family from falling apart. Over the course of one summer, two boys will have to face their biggest fears and decide what they're willing to risk -- to get the thing they want the most. This is a phenomenal book, in my humble opinion. There aren't too many books dealing with male sexual abuse, particularly in YA. Sex and sexuality are messy parts of young adulthood, but what this book does really well is discuss consent and the ways in which physical cues can be misinte...
Read more

Girls Like Us - Gail Giles

Image
I have now gone out and made sure that I have all of the books longlisted for the National Book Award. I read and reviewed a number of these previously, so now I have five left to read and review. This is one of those five (but would I expect anything less from the fabulous team at Candlewick?) Girls Like Us  is a unique novel in a number of respects, most notably in the fact that both protagonists are identified (and self-identified) as mentally disabled in some way. Biddy has a learning disability that she was born with, while Quincy is a young girl who is disabled due to the fact that her mother's boyfriend hit her in the head with a brick, disfiguring her and damaging her brain. Once the two girls graduate from school, they move into a house together, becoming caregivers for both each other and an older woman, Elizabeth. The two must rely on each other for comfort, knowledge, and emotional strength, and Elizabeth manages to help them along the way. While I had moments of wo...
Read more