This book is not going to be to everyone's taste, I'd better say that off the bat. In large part, it wasn't to my taste, and YET. It was just so heartbreaking and true, and I have to tip my hat to that in a big way even if it made me squirm kind of a lot. 
 By weird chance, I read The Fault in Our Stars at the same time as this book, and I think TFIOS suffered by the comparison. Both are tragic (well, kinda -- TFIOS veers more toward the bittersweet) but TFIOS came across as so sterile and calculated by comparison. Which is not fair to TFIOS, I'm pretty sure, but there you go. Sometimes reading ain't fair. 
 I had been going to dock this book a star because the kids are in jr high when they seem a lot older to me, and this was causing me some dissonance. However, I have since learned that it was inspired by a true incident, of an 8th grader who was murdered after asking another boy to be his Valentine. I have to allow, therefore, that maybe it's not implausible that these are 8th graders, but it is in fact my antique prudishness that can't quite accept it. 
 Anyway, this is super painful. The whole last chapter... I wanted it all to be his imagination. My mind was frantically back-pedalling the whole time, no no no, this doesn't happen, he was going to get out, I JUST WANT HIM TO BE OK, no no no. I tell you this to warn you. This is not a beautiful or redemptive book. It's bleak, but it managed to convince me that it was also necessary. 
 And it made TFIOS feel like a movie, distant and flickery and ultimately cold.