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Charm & Strange | LitPick Book Reviews
Charm & Strange
Charm & Strange: A Novel
Charm & Strange
Stephanie Kuehn
The 2014 Winner of the William C. Morris AwardWhen you've been kept caged in the dark, it's impossible to see the forest for the trees. It's impossible to see anything, really. Not without bars . . . In Stephanie Kuehn's brilliant debut Charm & Strange, 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.

Book Details

Genre: 

  • Fiction

Age Level: 

  • Mature Young Adult
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This book is about a boy named Winston. Andrew Winston. As the book's description tells, he is torn between that which he is and that which he was. The book switches every other chapter to each life and gives you glimpses into this character's motivations. Winston is at a boarding school, sent away from home for reasons unknown to the reader until the end. Win is very unstable and is quite an unnerving character but even still one I grew to love over the course of each chapter.

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