Complicit by Stephanie Kuehn

Right from the get-go the reader knows one thing: someone in the book is complicit, thanks to the title by Stephanie Kuehn.

As the book opens we learn that Jamie Henry is very concerned. His sister, Crazy Cate, is getting out of juvenile detention where she has been for the past two years after to confessing to burning down the neighbors fancy horse barn. Jamie knows that Cate will come back for him and he is not sure that he can cope with her reappearance. In fact, weird old symptoms come back. Symptoms that used to plague him when he was younger. He also recovers some lost memories, memories from life before their adoption. He even begins to wonder if he was complicit in Cate's crime.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Jamie is the quintessential unreliable narrator. The reader knows that all the information is not available and Jamie, who had recently stopped taking his prozac cold-turkey, seems confused about the details himself. It is nearly impossible to tell the truth from the delusions. Cate's role in the story is tantamount to a chess game and it is her move up next.

Kuehn’s second novel, after her Morris Award–winning Charm & Strange,powerfully examines how mental illness can turn into family tragedy that ripples far and wide beyond a single event. The prose is as hallucinatory as the madness Jamie seeks to uncover in a novel that’s tense and ambiguous from start to finish.- Children's Book Review, Publishers Weekly

 Hang on. The ending is both surprising and shocking. Is "check" or "checkmate?' Read it and find out for yourself.

30 books Summer Reading Challenge

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