"Mysterious and Intriguing CHARM & STRANGE will Charm Readers"
Reviewed by Sarah Horwath
Posted August 4, 2013
Young Adult
No one really knows who Andrew Winston Winters is. Least of
all himself. He is part Win, a lonely teenager exiled to a
remote boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The
guy who shuts the whole world out, no matter the cost,
because his darkest fear is of himself ...of the wolfish
predator within. But he's also part Drew, the angry boy with
violent impulses that control him. The boy who, one fateful
summer, was part of something so terrible it came close to
destroying him.
CHARM & STRANGE is a deftly woven, elegant, unnerving
psychological thriller about a boy at war with himself.
Reading CHARM & STRANGE was a bit of a struggle for me
because I don't normally read paranormal, sometimes it just
doesn't really interest me to read it. CHARM & STRANGE
requires a lot of patience and a reader who can sit and not
really have a clue what's going on just to make it to the
excellent conclusion.
The ending makes this book, it gives
the story its strength, which makes the reader become
restless waiting to find out what this weird little novel is
working towards. I did enjoy reading CHARM & STRANGE it was
defiantly a struggle to read but a good struggle I stood by
the book and pushed through to find out what was going to
happen to Win/ Drew.
CHARM & STRANGE is a story split into
two: a tale from the past and present. The stories are about
the same guy - Andrew Winston Winters (Drew/Win) - but they
paint two very different before and after pictures. An angry
young boy (Drew) spending a summer with his family, and a
lonely teenager (Win) at a New England boarding school who
is hiding dark secrets about the truth of his childhood and
perhaps even the person he is.
Win is a weird, complicated and intriguing character from
the very first page and he continued to tug at my heart
strings and drive me insane throughout. The mysterious tone
of the entire novel dragged me helplessly towards the end in
my need to discover the underlying truths about Win and what
happens at the full moon.
CHARM & STRANGE is full of
questions and secrets, every corner you turn seems to lead
you down an even more complex path with even bigger and
darker questions begging to be answered. This is a brave and
exciting book and makes you really think about the what ifs
in Win's life. There will be a few readers who will not like
it and some that will. Overall this was a great interesting
read and I was glad to stick through it to see what would
happen to Win/Drew.
SUMMARY
When you’ve been kept caged in the dark, it’s impossible
to see the forest for the trees. It’s impossible to see
anything, really. Not without bars . . . In Stephanie Kuehn's brilliant debut Charm &
Strange, Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.
He’s part Win, the lonely teenager
exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a
family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates
out, no matter the cost. He’s part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses
that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago
summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure
a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the
unthinkable. Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in
the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his
past and the isolation of his present. Before the sun rises, he’ll either surrender his sanity to
the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the
most elemental of truths—that choosing to live can mean so
much more than not dying.
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