Patrick Ness was one of my favourite authors as a teenager, and while I haven’t followed his work as closely as I’ve grown up, this book was a reminder of quite how talented a writer he is.

📚Find this and more reviews on my blog!📚

I will admit I was cautious at the start of this one, but I was soon completely absorbed in the story. We follow four boys who attend an all-boys school, and over the course of a few weeks the friendships and relationships between them shift, are built up, and are torn down. It’s incredibly moving, and at the heart of it is a realisation that intimacy and romance come in many different forms.

The ‘gimmick’ of the book is that the less PG words and phrases are blacked out. It’s done very well – in a slightly meta twist the characters themselves are aware of it, so they use it for comedic purposes. The idea is to tell a story about teenagers’ real lives without any of the words/phrases that aren’t allowed to be used in teen media. While it felt a bit obnoxious at first, I soon came round to it. After all, we now have an internet culture where censorship is so out of hand that you can’t use the word ‘mascara’ without clarifying that you do, in fact, just mean mascara. With that in mind, it’s a genius move.

The illustrations by Tea Bendix really tie the whole story together, and heighten the emotional beats of the story.

This is an excellent novella: poignant, moving, and utterly heart-breaking.

Thank you to the publishers for providing me with a copy for an honest review.