So I hate boys again...
This seems to be a theme with me and books lately -- the ones I find myself unable to put down have been making me feel very strongly one way or another about either gender and this one (as did Oscar Wao) makes me hate boys. So much. Girls, too.
The best parts about the book were Smith's use of unique ways of describing things. She has a way about her words where she can describe something we've all felt about anything in a way it's never been described but gets it dead on with accuracy. I liked that.
I also, for better or worse, enjoyed being angry for a good portion of this book. Everybody's an asshole (nearly). And they do stupid, asshole things. Some of them learn, but for the most part they don't. There was a certain refreshing honesty in this lack of a full-circle "well, I'll know better next time" sort of thing. The characters' collective assholeish-ness and failure to gain any insight from anything they've experienced was something I found realistic because it was so infuriating so often.
Smith also uses "opposites" as a running motif. Everybody and everything major has a counter: The characters, the situations they get themselves into, the perspectives, the sex scenes...
I do wish that I hadn't chosen this one for a bus book though. It took more time to get back into the story than I was generally giving myself (to get from point A to point B) and I feel like I deprived myself of full comprehension of some of the more complicated scenes. It is also a book that I wish I could have read *with* somebody else so that I could talk about a few things. It's a book that begs to be talked about, whether you loved or hated it.
Forgive me for my incoherent babbling, it's past midnight which means it's well past my self-assigned bedtime and I'm really pretty useless for much other than sleep (and not even that, it seems) right now
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