This book is such a sleeper hit for me, and will rest inside my brain for years to come. I won it a while ago in a giveaway and finally decided to read it. What a strangely beautiful story of love between two young men. From the moment Jarrod comes back into Aiden's life you can tell he will be making drastic changes to this quiet, invisible boy. But, this is also a story about family grudges, past mistakes, a mother's pain, a sons rage, and the scars that trauma leaves. It was at once magical and all too real. The world that Aiden can see is one of wonder, but under it all is the reality of death. One day we will all come face to face with death, and what will our life story be? The idea of being able to bargain your life story to appease death and allow you more time, just blew me away. The story was framed in the way that Aiden is telling it to an audience, the best version he can remember (even as he struggles with the gaps that magic misused against him created in his mind). This book felt at once otherworldly, a fantasy being whispered by bedside, and grounded in reality, a mother trying to protect her children and failing to calculate love into her sons story. It was eerie, mysterious, dreadful. Throughout I felt like a ghost watching these two boys trying desperately to understand something that happened long before they were born, something tearing them apart and trying to kill one of them. The back story is dark and is one of a rich man misusing those who work for him. It involves an old tree with a hole in it, a dark secret that a family tries desperately to rid themselves of by reinventing their story, and the son caught up in the deceit. It is also a story about refinding community and friendship, the need for other people. Isolation was used to try to protect, but in the end it was a weapon against Aiden and his family. They needed those they called friends and loved ones in order to really stop what was happening. Honestly, it is a book you have to read to feel both the dread and the whimsy, the beauty and the anguish, the truth, the lies, the unbearable weight of love and trust. Because, in the end Aiden's life was altered by the person he loved and trusted the most, and while she (trying a bit to hide plot details) may have thought her motives just, she took it upon herself to change his life without his permission. And she continued to attempt to control him, even knowing how much it was hurting him. She tried finally to be selfless, but again made decisions for the future without talking to Aiden first. I did find some sections of the book to be too long, or too convoluted, and I was frustrated by the back and forth about "the story." I felt the pace meandered from fast to slow to fast again. However, the overall book is something else entirely. Poetic, languid, dark, but generally a fast read. This book held such a mix of emotions for me and had me both feeling sad and tense and light and hopeful. There were lines that are etched into my mind for life. The ending especially was so resonating, that there is so much more life to be lived and we must live it to the fullest in order to have a great story to tell when death comes to visit.
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