megancsparks

I liked this book perfectly fine up until the end, which is set in a different time decade than the rest of the book and just seems to throw everything off-kilter.

I think basically everybody knew somebody like Ralph growing up. Pretty much everybody knew somebody like a lot of the characters in this book. Even set 30-40 years ago, some things just stay the same with time, and one of those is adolescence - confusion over the opposite sex, a conviction that you must be a pervert because you have all these weird sexual feelings, a feeling of complete lack of control over your surroundings. John McNally is really good at evoking that confusion and all around odd period in life. The situations his characters find themselves in start off ordinary and sort of balloon up like a Simpsons episode, getting kind of crazy as it goes on, but it's pretty good anyway because you still feel tied to the characters.

But that ending section. Man. I just didn't like it. I didn't want to know what happened in that section. I liked seeing the characters the way they were in the rest of the book. For some reason it just depressed me, got me down. I'd have really liked the book much more if it had ended with the chapter "A Diagram of the Future."