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Title: The bad kind of depressing.
Review: I really loved HIROSHIMA and especially MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE, so I picked up this one at a used book store. It is sort of like CATCHER IN THE RYE or A SEPARATE PEACE in that it is a story of young men away at school, and what that can be like. But this thing just went foul and relentlessly dour on me. The protagonist just spirals into this nastier and nastier situation and in the end is none the better for it (IMHO), hasn't learned anything, none of that stuff that is supposed to happen to protagonists. I felt horrible after finishing this, and it wasn't the "good" kind of horrible. Just depressed and sickened. I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 only because the writing itself is good; just the story was really really weak.
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