goodreads | Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

Title: Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
Author: Matthew Quick
Genre: YA
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 273
Date read: June, 2015

Today is Leonard Peacock's birthday. It is also the day he hides a gun in his backpack. Because today is the day he will kill his former best friend, and then himself, with his grandfather's P-38 pistol.

But first he must say good-bye to the four people who matter most to him: his Humphrey Bogart-obsessed next-door neighbor, Walt; his classmate, Baback, a violin virtuoso; Lauren, the Christian homeschooler he has a crush on; and Herr Silverman, who teaches the high school's class on the Holocaust. Speaking to each in turn, Leonard slowly reveals his secrets as the hours tick by and the moment of truth approaches.

I'd only heard raving reviews about this book, so I was very eager to read it. Unfortunately - as you can see from the rating - it could not live up to my expectations at all. I thought it was okay, but certainly no more than that. So it's not that I disliked it, or regret having read it, it just wasn't the amazing reading experience I had hoped for it to be.

Which is a shame, because I really liked the topic chosen for the book, and in the right hands, think it could have made an amazing novel. But at the end of the day, I didn't care terribly for Matthew Quick's writing style, so the story fell flat.

Also the ending was a disappointment, and seemed very much like a "non-resolution" to the very serious topic of the book as a whole.