This book is about three messed up teens who are different kinds of monsters, and I don’t use that word lightly. I mean, these characters were awful—borderline sociopathic and just nasty in the way that they thought:
“She puffed harder on her cigarette, enjoying the burn on her windpipe and the hope that she was giving someone somewhere cancer.”
But that kind of just made them even more interesting to read about.
Delicate Monsters was a character study with a loose focus on the plot. It dove into the minds of Sadie Su, Emerson, and Miles. I thought the switching of narratives flowed really well and it was an incredibly interesting psychological exploration.
She didn’t lie. She told him the honest truth about himself.
“Bad,” she told him brightly. “You’re a bad person.”
After not being a fan of Charm & Strange, I decided to pick up another Kuehn novel because I couldn’t help admiring her gritty and addictive writing. Her books are unlike anything I’ve read, and I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I’ve said this before: I think they’re for a very specific type of audience—those who like the dark and malicious—so I’d hesitate to recommend them.
Things got so intense that at one point I thought, “Is this really a YA book?” Not that I think it should have been in the adult genre instead—in fact I hate when people say “that was too violent” or “too sexy” for teens to read, as if they have any right to constrict a person’s reading material. But with Kuehn, she really goes there and isn’t afraid to cross lines YA authors normally hold back from.
Such an odd, intriguing little book.
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