There were a few points to this novel that were spot-on for the time and place, and I fully enjoyed reliving some of the events that were similar to mine, including the RHPS. Nostalgia aside, I did appreciate the wide range of life that was touched upon within these pages, including both the hard topics and the trivial, but at the end of the reading, I was left feeling that the narrator was just a tad too immature for a fifteen year old. If he was twelve or eleven, then perhaps most of the novel may have been a cohesive whole, skipping the passages of the first date or his other fumbling attempts. 
 Granted, the surprise ending did shine a much better light upon the rest of the text, but even so, his retiring intellectual acumen could have easily let him work through even his level of immaturity. 
 The fact is, the narrator was too advanced in some ways to be so ignorant of his other shortcomings, and that is despite the end's recoloring of the events. 
 Are we working with a novel about a shy and retiring young man more interesting in perceiving the world rather than living it, or are we dealing with the natural consequence of early molestation? On the one hand, I'm down with with the feel and treatment of the novel, save my previous complaint, but on the other hand, it implies that all introverts must have been molested or otherwise had gone through some trauma that made them that way. 
 It's not like introverts couldn't be traumatized by life, itself, could it? No, no, that would never do as a novel. Lol. 
 Despite this, i did think the novel was charming.