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I agree with the reviewer who said there was a tragic twist way too late in the plot. For one, it was completely unneeded; the main theme of the story was already resolved and everything that followed did feel tacked on. It was also not in keeping with the rest of the book's tone. The narrator makes you believe you are in a comedy for about 400 pages when actually he's narrating a tragedy. Plus it's not really relevant to most of us cause that kind of thing basically doesn't happen.(view spoiler)[(There were about 1200 hate crimes in the US in 2011 which were about sexuality, and probably none or just a handful of those were comparable to what happend in the book) (hide spoiler)] So while the rest of the book feels very near a real teenagers coming-of-age problems, this just made you realize the story was pure fiction. If a book wants to take on such an outlier event, I think it has to be about that from the start.

I had some more issues with the voice of the narrator. Ryan Dean in fact has it all: He's smart, he's brave, he's tough, he's liked by the best-looking girls, respected by all his team members etc. But he doesn't notice that. He keeps repeating what a loser he is. That's funny the first few times, but after a while it just gets embarrassing because how can such a smart kid not realize he's dead wrong about himself? The author makes the narrator build up and tackle all these virtual problems even though in fact there are none, and that makes the narrator sound, well, either whiny or completely self-obsessed and trying to hide his ego behind a thin veil of false modesty.

Finally, the "perverse" banter between Annie and Ryan Dean somehow didn't feel quite right until they actually got together. I thought it was much too open about sexuality. Teenagers are usually very shy when talking to the opposite gender. At least I don't know any fourteen- and sixteen-year-old boys and girls who talk to each other like that.

That said, I still enjoyed the book.