A student recommended this book to me and it took me a while to get into it. Some of the language here is beautiful in its brokenness, the way Charlie's story comes to us in fragments. However, some of the language is clunky. "My eyes were fierce with water" and some of the earlier phrases were jarring in their strangeness. Maybe that's partly to show the narrator's altered state of mind, but if that was the case, it wasn't plain.
There were a couple parts of this book that dragged, especially the 30 or so pages right after the climactic event. I suddenly didn't care any more until the action made it back to the main city. I listened to this on audiobook. The narration was amazing and that's probably why I didn't skip through that section.
The ending is poignant and this story is another that I would whole-heartedly recommend to educators. It's amazing what teenagers can go through and we need to not turn a blind eye to it. This story may seem extreme, but it's reality for far too many and it was mostly reality for the author. I think that's what really makes this book work.