"Things I didn't expect to do my senior year: 
 Become a drug dealer. 
 Become my mother. 
 Find and lose the love of my life." 
 "There are moments, when you're getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you've known your whole life." 
 I cannot even express how much I loved this book. I read the first chapter and knew I was going to enjoy it, but I had no idea I was going to love it. It was Unputdownable. I laughed and cried and my heart broke and then I cried and laughed again at the same time. This wasn't at all what I imagined it would be like. It was so raw and passionate and intense. It pushed its way into my veins and it festered and I became obsessed. It's a coming of age story of forbidden romance between a high school senior and her teacher. She is 18 and he's 32 so it's not necessarily an unreasonable age difference. Legally she is an adult so the only real issue between these two is moral. It's about fate stepping in and putting two people in the same place at the same time. It's about taking the road less traveled. They truly love and care for each other and he really does want what is best for her, but neither one is able to stop what's between them. What really reached out to me is the fact that both characters are both so flawed, so human. So many romance stories these days have the cookie cutter "pure, innocent" protagonist and the dearly loved alpha male. In Unteachable they are both so broken by their pasts and current situations.There are some serious plot twists in here. You know reading a book like this, it's definitely like stepping on an IED. It's falling in love, growing up, betrayal, heartbreak, blackmail, friendship all wrapped into one hell of a roller coaster ride. 
 During the summer before her senior year of high school, 18 year old Maise O'Malley meets Evan Wilke at a carnival in the front row of a roller coaster. Deathsnake. This is fitting considering she takes us on a ride through this whole book. She's there to face one of her childhood fears "...because I was tired of being a kid, stuck with kid fears and kid memories. I wanted to go in as an adult." Evan is also there to face his life long fear of roller coasters and to satisfy his curiosity since he has a view of the carnival from his apartment. 
 "I see the lights here every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one's letting me in on the secret." 
 They begin to flirt. 
 "How old are you" he said, right on cue. 
 I love what that does to their faces. 
 Old enough to...fill in the blank. 
 But The Guy only smiled. "I don't want your parents to think I'm some creep." 
 He could have said, I'm a teacher, and everything would have been different." 
 But he didn't. So we got this lovely story of growing up and falling in love in a most unconventional way. 
 "And I felt something I've never felt before. You can call it love, or you can call it free fall. They're pretty much the same thing." 
 After hitting it off over some rides and a few beers, they go off to talk, which leads to them sleeping together in his car. Maise is no stranger to older men or random sex with strange men. 
 "Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick." 
 He tells her he doesn't want it to be just a hook up, that he wants to know her. In the heat of the moment she tells him it doesn't have to be. He was different with her than her usual sexual encounters. 
 "His eyes moved over my body but now, unlike earlier, they lingered on my face. Panic. 
 He was looking at me like he knew me. Not in the biblical sense-obviously we were past that-but in a you-are-more-than-a-quick-fuck sense." 
 "How the hell was I going to get out?" 
 "Would it be too rude to just open the door right now?" 
 Feeling more than just a little vulnerable, she makes an excuse to meet up with him later and bails. 
 "Yeah, I hook up with older guys. And then I leave them, before they can leave me. Thanks for the abandonment issues, Dad. Fuck you very much." 
 Maise hasn't had an easy life. She's already told us she's screwed up growing up without a father. She also has a drug addict, whore mother who sells drugs to pay for her habit. She refuses to end up like her mother and knows she's getting out of town when she graduates, going to film school, and never looking back. One of the things I love the most about her is her strength and resilience. She's messed up and she has issues, but she will be the first to admit it. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, shes sarcastic and brushes it off with humor. 
 When Maise heads in to Film Studies on her first day of senior year, guess who is her teacher. Mr. Evan Wilke from the carnival. 
 "If I hadn't left that night, if this kept going...would you still think we should stop now? 
 "I don't know." 
 "Do you really want to stop?" 
 "No," he said softly. 
 They continue their affair, and he slowly starts tearing down her walls. The way he looks at her after sex. The texts telling her he wishes she was there with him. How he cares about her future and her happiness. 
 "When he drove away I took a picture of the receding taillights, and after his car was gone I stood there holding the photo up to the street, pretending. What is this feeling? I wondered. What is this hunger that grows worse the more I feed it? They'd come up with a name for it a long time ago. But you already know what it's called, don't you?" 
 Evan has a friend in St. Louis who agrees to sublet his loft to them on the weekends. They spend every weekend together, agreeing to keep it teacher student during the week. It doesn't stay that way. Moments alone in his classroom between classes, sneaking out to see each other on weeknights, their passion is intense. It is crazy, mad, insane, obsessive."I don't want to stop. I can't stop with you." 
 I love the intensity of their relationship. 
 "We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it's causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little." 
 They are truly passionate about each other. It's not just the sex. 
 "This is ridiculous," I said, trying to laugh it off. "I never cry at movies.""That's because you've never been in love," he said. 
 Although there is something so alluring about the forbidden. They know their relationship is wrong and Maise never tries to redeem any of it to the reader. 
 "...if our relationship was based on forbiddenness, what would happen when it was no longer forbidden?" 
 "I've been pretty honest, haven't I? So I'll admit: it wasn't innocent, blind love. His age drew me to him in the first place; now it was his being my teacher that gave me a wild, terrified thrill every time we touched, infusing me with adrenaline, making my skin prickle.""...but I wasn't kidding myself. The forbiddenness was part of it." 
 "I keep pretending I'm okay, looking at you in class and playing Mr. Good Teacher, when all I want to do is take you in my arms. And I want you to know that even know we have to do this, the hiding and pretending, there's not a moment that goes by when I'm not thinking of you, wishing it was different." 
 "Still there. The taboo. That kernel of wrongness. That thing I didn't entirely want to lose, because the nasty little Lolita in me liked it." 
 Evan has secrets though. Maise acknowledges that there are things he's not telling her. 
 Evan also had a difficult upbringing. Together they are able to bond over the loss of innocence and growing up quickly. 
 Secrets begin to emerge and with a passion burning this intensely it's only a matter of time before the truth comes out. What happens when life and love don't follow a script? 
 "She was starving for something, and the more she ate of it, the thinner she became." 
 "The more you took, the more you needed. And you'd keep taking more and more and more until you overdosed." 
 "Why do I need you like this?" 
 "Because you're addicted." 
 "We couldn't have shown up together, but here we were anyway. It was in the script." 
 As Maise navigates on the edge of adulthood, she learns that maybe we never really grow up. 
 "We get bigger, and older, but part of us always retains that small rabbit heart, trembling furiously, secretively, with wonder and fear." 
 "Nobody knows how to be a grown-up. We're all just pretending for each other." 
 Things really start to go crazy about 3/4 of the way through. At that point I was worried I had invested my emotions in something that was going to just break my heart, because I was right there with Maise the whole story. I felt like everything that happens and everything they go through needs to happen to answer the question of, if he wasn't her teacher and she wasn't his student, would they still have something between them? For me, the ending was abrupt, but it felt exactly like something you'd see on the big screen. I was happy with how it concluded. Raeder possesses a magical, lyrical quality to her writing that I fell in love with. She writes in technicolor. All of the smells, the places, the views, textures, angles, colors. It's all there in the book and it enhances the beauty and the rawness of the story. It's gritty. It's passionate. It's real. 
 "You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you'll lose it someday." 
 "That's all life is. Breathing in, Breathing out. The space between two breaths."