Narrated by: Nick Podehl
I have been an ardent fan of the author and her tales for a while now. I have reviewed a lot of her books on my blog:
As a seasoned listener to the author’s books, I thought I could gauge the level of emotional investment I would require for this, but I was wrong. I did not shed tears over this as I did for many others, but I felt a lot of other different emotions. This book is about suicidal thoughts/suicide and addiction. Putting it this bluntly makes it sound dark and dull while the book was neither. It was surprising how delicately, but equally importantly, the realities of situations were laid out.
The scenes were shown as facts with no frills, nothing to distract us from the situation and the individual importance of caring. Lucas Painter cares too much, he feels the weight of anything he takes on. He has a clarity of thought that gets even sharper when nudged along the right direction and that summer of 1969, he gets a lot of nudging. The story begins innocuously enough about a boy in an unhappy home who escapes to the quiet outdoors and encounters a house in the middle of nowhere. That marks the beginning of a lot of things, most importantly the widening of Lucas’ mind. The time is fraught with uncertainty that comes from waging war in another country when most of the public doesn’t understand the need for. Money is tight, and Lucas is navigating the average teenage life in a small town where memories run deep as do a few prejudices. Lucas does his best, and it was fascinating to watch him work out where he wants to be in life.
As mentioned earlier, I did not weep like I did with the previous book, but this felt momentous in its own right due to the heavy subjects dealt with in such a unique manner. Stay is a word that I will for, some time to come, associate with a weightier meaning than just continuing to remain in a particular spot or situation.
I saw two great reviews for this book in the past month or so, which upped my excitement, and I was brimming with it so much so, that I listened to the whole thing in one day!
Berit @Audio Killed the Bookmark and Evelina @ Avalinah’s Bookspace
My last KU review was: Don’t Even Breathe (Maggie Novak Thriller #1) by Keith Houghton and my queue now looks like this:
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Superfluous Reading 