Title: Charm & Strange Author: Stephanie Kuehn
Published: June 10, 2014
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 224
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.
He's part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost.
He's part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable.
Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present. Before the sun rises, he'll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths-that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying.
In a debut novel that’s hauntingly written and uniquely bizarre, Stephanie Kuehn deals with tough subjects in a way that I’ve never seen—and considering I’ve been around the block and seen my share of YA realistic fiction, that’s saying something. Charm & Strange is a book that relies heavily on suspense and plot twists to make its point, and though I saw it coming, I nevertheless found that the author’s skill and ability were remarkable, especially considering how short this book is.
Two narratives tell two stories about two boys—ten-year-old Drew and sixteen-year-old Win—who are not removed enough from each other for Win to have forgotten that, once upon a time, he was also Drew. Kuehn deals primarily in examining the psychology of this dual-sided character, and works toward revealing what happened, why Win has dissociated himself from Drew, the little boy he used to be. It’s an incredibly complex task that the author undertakes, and I feel that it would have been easy to do it badly, but Charm & Strange is subtly told, with a slow build that is appropriate and entrancing. A book so internally-focused could have seemed to go nowhere or have become boring, but it didn’t happen here.
This is helped, in large part, by Kuehn’s sparing, elegant prose. This author doesn’t just use words as a method to tell the story; the words are part of the story. The specific imagery of Win’s internal conflict is just as important as the conflict itself, and the author’s precise word-choice gave the impression of a wildness only barely tamed, much like Win’s character itself. In Charm & Strange, the author wields words to work towards her goals, and the end result is tight, effective prose that captures the savage atmosphere of the story even as it reveals a deeply intimate portrait of a teenage boy.
There is a lot about this book that’s understated; sometimes things are left to reader inference. Stephanie Kuehn expects her young adult audience to be intelligent and sympathetic, and I appreciate the trust she displays in her young readers. Charm & Strange is meant to provoke emotional and mental responses, and I think it achieves that. What the reader takes away depends—Kuen doesn’t hand-hold her readers. The level of maturity and nuance in this book makes it one that’s hard to put down and, perhaps, hard to forget.
