Sadie, Emerson, and Miles... 3 teens interconnected in all the worst ways. Sadie has just been kicked out of her final boarding school amid criminal charges. Emerson is hiding from his dark and angry past. And Miles is a sickly boy with dark thoughts. Sadie knew the 2 brothers when they were kids, and it seems her coming home for the first time in years has ignited some sort of fuse. In the end, only Miles (who sees visions) knows where they're all headed.... and it doesn't seem good.

My Thoughts:
What. Did. I. Just. Read? I feel insane after reading this book. It's like nothing I've ever read before. I feel like I need a Dr. Call-Me-Tom (the school psychologist that Miles and Sadie briefly speak with) to explain some of this stuff to me.

Basically this book is about 3 teens who are missing vital pieces of their personalities. Sadie is missing the empathy part. She's a girl who does things to entertain herself, out of boredom, and just because. Mean things. And she doesn't care what the person she's doing it to is feeling. She just doesn't know how. Emerson feels more empathy than Sadie... at least he feels guilt over the things he's done. But he has a dark side that he can't really control. Miles is tougher to figure out. He's this sickly kid who gets bullied constantly. But at the same time, it's not like he's sad about the lack of human interaction. He doesn't want any.

Of all the characters Sadie stood out the most for me. I just kept wanting her to care, knowing she was never going to. That's just not how sociopaths work. They can't learn to care. The author tried really hard to make me hate this girl, but something about her, I just didn't. This is probably going to sound stupid, but I almost got to the giving up point on her when she went to the bathroom and didn't wipe just because she could. I mean EWW!!! And there were many of those random moments where I was completely disgusted with this character. And somehow I kept on hoping she would feel bad for what she did in her previous school, and hoping she would save Miles somehow.

The ending of this book is just???? I'm really not sure what I just read. I think the coolness of the writing and the short poignant chapters won me over. Also the uniqueness and feel of the entire book. But I still wished for more of an ending. And I also wished for more from Miles. I felt like he had a much bigger story inside of him and I wanted to hear it.

OVERALL: This author is not afraid to tell it. This book is creepy, chilling, frustrating, scary, (gross at times), and tries to do something out of the box. I'm not sure it completely succeeded with me, but I could not put it down. It's definitely not going to be for everyone, but I feel like it's worth a try to see if it clicks with you. If nothing else, you'll get to read good writing and something completely new and fresh.

My Blog:
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Delicate Monsters is a YA book that shows the dark side of mental illness. I’m not talking about teens with depression and anxiety. I’m talking about three very troubled teens. There's also sex, alcohol, poisoning, and animal killing thrown into the story. This is a disturbing novel that will take you on a very dark journey.

Seventeen-year-old Sadie loves cruelty. She has a sense of euphoria after she’s committed a cruel act against someone. Here’s one small example. She made her mother cry about her sick grandfather who was on his death bed and afterwards, Sadie felt all warm and fuzzy about it. Part of that warm fuzziness was because she had been drinking. Afterwards, her father lectures her about her love of cruelty and how it’s a bad thing. Then, he reminds her of a fantastic and famous quote from St. Thomas Aquinas:

”The things that we love tell us what we are.”

Sadie knows Emerson’s secrets and loves taunting him about it, but she’s done things much worse than that. Her cruelty almost got another teen killed and she was kicked out of three boarding schools.

Emerson is cruel, but he’s different than Sadie. He has secrets he wants to forget, but his constant guilt is eating away at him. He feels tormented by the horrible things he’s done. He’s in love with May, but he does something heinous that someone would never do if they truly loved someone. He does something horrible to his brother and his mother gets blamed for it. He cuts the legs off of frogs and then watches them die. You have to be a sick bastard to do that. Actually, I know of somebody in high school who did that. He laughed hysterically when he finished his story. I had a crush on him until that very moment. I was devastated when I learned how much I misjudged him.

Anyway, Emerson’s brother, Miles, is “haunted.” He hears voices, sometimes from dead, mutilated animals. He sees into the future, especially anything violent. Miles is terrified of Emerson and for good reason. Some of the things he does to his brother are revolting. The only peace he gets is when he’s hospitalized. As a result, Miles is sick a lot.

I’m just giving you little snippets, but there’s a lot more to the story. There were a few lines that I thought were deep and it got me thinking. I love when that happens, because in unexpected moments, I read a line that applies to my own life in some bizarre way.

One of the three teens brings a gun to school. I don’t want to give anything away, so I won’t tell you who or what happens.

Also, get ready to hear about Connell’s Zaroff and Rainsford. Seriously. It actually fits into the story, though.

The title Delicate Monsters is perfect. That’s the best way to describe Sadie, Emerson and Miles.

At the end, you’ll be wondering if you’re a lamb among wolves or a wolf among lambs. I already know which one I am.

If you love YA novels or novels that have characters with mental illnesses, you’ll love this one.
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DNF at 25%

This book just wasn't for me. Maybe it's because I just finished a psychological thriller that I loved, but I found this to be slow and drab. This could change later in the book. Many reviewers speak highly of it, so I don't discourage others from giving it a try.

This book was a disappointment. Kuehn plays around with different things, classism, privilege, mental illness, familial tragedy, but doesn't fully explore any one thing. The three characters she exploits are clearly mentally ill, but she superficially uses that to twist their interactions with one another to move the story along, but it's shallow and contrived. ( )

Overall Impression: I would say this book is one of those that is a fun, quick, fast-paced read that you will enjoy during your time reading it.

Recommended for: Those who like realistic young adult fiction.

I didn't dislike reading this book, but I wasn't jumping out my seat about it either. It was basically just all right. However, I don't necessarily consider this a bad thing. I was entertained while I was reading it, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a book in the realistic YA genre. Mainly, my lower score comes from the fact that I'm not super in to this particular genre of YA (I focus more on fantasy and sci-fi). In fact I normally wouldn't have read this book, but the description led me to believe that it had some interesting supernatural elements to it. However, these elements are not major points in the book, so I was a little disappointed. Yet despite this, I still enjoyed the book as a whole.

One of the appealing aspects of this book is that you're never really sure how you feel about these characters, and how by the end of the book, you find that you feel very differently about these characters than when you first started out. (This mainly applies to the characters of Sadie and Emerson.) This makes for a rather dynamic group of characters that keep you interested in the story if only to see where they end up.

Sadie is more of an anti-hero. A girl who finds it difficult to relate to others and gets a strange and sometimes disturbing enjoyment from seeing the pain of others. However, as the story continues, we find that she is capable of feeling compassion for other people. A fact that surprises not just the reader, but Sadie as well.

Emerson starts off as a rather likable character, and we start off by sympathizing with him. His life is pretty difficult, and he ends up having to shoulder a lot for a someone so young. Yet as the book goes on, we soon learn that Emerson has some dark secrets. Secrets that he is eventually forced to face when Sadie come back to town.

My main complainant was the handling of Miles' power to see the future. It reads more like an extraneous detail rather than something that acts as a plot driver or character development tool. This aspect of the book is never really examined and at times feels more like Miles is imagining these things rather than actually seeing the future. I also don't think it really added to his character in anyway to the point that if the this detail were to be eliminated from the book, there wouldn't be much a difference. It seemed more like an attempt at trying to put a few fantasy/supernatural aspects in the story, but it just gets lost. I sometimes forgot that this was even a thing at times until is came up again.

I will say that the ending was quite good. It was unexpected, which actually says quite a bit about Stephanie Kuehn's storytelling skills since there are so many YA books that are extremely predictable. This one, not so much. And this was very refreshing.

Overall, Delicate Monsters is an enjoyable book. It's a great book for a quick read since the chapters are short and are skillfully timed so they always end on a cliffhanger that keeps you reading. It's actually pretty difficult to put down once you get started. ( )