Amazing sentences, on every single page, time and again, and an impressive speed, but after reading it for a while, noticed I'm still not too taken with any of the characters to care too much for them.
He left the boy outside its own front door. Farewell to it, and good luck to it. He wasn't going to feed it anymore; from here on in it would be squared shoulders and jaws, and strong arms and best feet forward. He left the boy a pile of mangled, skinny limbs and stepped through the door a newborn man, stinging a little in the sights of the sprite guiding his metamorphosis. Karine D'Arcy was her name. She was fifteen and a bit and had been in his class for the past three years. Outside of school she consistently outclassed him, and yet here she was, standing in his hall on a Monday lunchtime. And so the boy had to go, what was left of him, what hadn't been flayed away by her hands and kisses.
They had gone to the pictures, they had eaten ice cream, they had meandered at the end of each meeting back to her road, holding hands. And lest they laid foundations too wholesome, they had found quiet spaces and dark corners in which to crumble that friendship, his palms recording the difference between the skin on her waist and on her breasts, his body pushing against hers so he could remember how her every hollow fit him.
Deirde Allen was as stubborn as she was tough, which may have sounded like an admirable mix, but as far as Jimmy could tell it simply meant she was too stupid to know when she was wrong and too slow to notice the consequences.
- but then it pissed him off that he couldn't approach her on his own two feet. That he was no more upright now than his father. That uselessness was hereditary.
Ellie looked worse than her exertions sounded. She frowned all the way through the piece and then turned and faced her audience like she'd been instructed to do so by a voice in her head which intended later to encourage her to burn down an orphanage.
