I expect nothing less than pristine writing from Anderson (Speak is one of my favorite YA books of all time), and she continues to deliver in Impossible Knife. There is just something about her style that drags me in and refuses to let me go. Case in point: I started this book on a plane after a late night, fully expecting to only get a few pages in before I dozed off. Instead, I read the whole time. 
 And this book does start off strong! Hayley is snarky and provides commentary on the stupidity of calculus and banning books. A girl after my own heart! 
 However, I didn't love this story as much as I have loved Anderson's earlier works. Hayley is a fairly realistic narrator, but that also means she is a 16/17 year old and can be very unwilling to see others' perspectives. And yet despite this stubbornness and how realistic she was, there was just something I really did not like about her. 
 Perhaps it was how quickly perfect-boy Finn fell for her despite her consistently rude attitude towards him when in their first reactions. And then when they did get together, it was just kind of brushed over and was too good too quickly? I mean, yeah, they still had fights, but I just didn't really feel it between them. 
 [As a side note, for a family struggling with finances drastically now after what sounds like a longer period of not great finances, maybe choosing swimming as Finn's sport was not the best choice. While it is growing in its availability to a range of economic backgrounds, it still frequently requires a fairly large financial investment from its athletes, more so than other sports]. 
 Also, for a book that is supposedly supposed to shine a light on PTSD, I am not sure this book did a great job of fleshing out exactly what that illness looks like. This could be because Hayley is our narrator and she is not the one suffering from PTSD, but there were times where I thought her father's illness could have been attributed to alcohol abuse just as much as PTSD (and yes, I realize that the two can be interrelated). 
 I always have a pack of students who like reading 'dark' books-- ones that deal with gritty subject matter, and this would be perfect for them. I don't feel the need to point it out to students beyond that. 
 As a side note, I never quite understood what this title meant.