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** spoiler alert ** Hilarious? I beg to differ. I didn't see anything hilarious in this novel. It started in an interesting way but then took the wrong turn.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

This seems to be another novel with a self-insert writer main character. While I understand the idea "write what you know," something feels fishy about this setup. I am left wondering how much of this is autobiographical. The author is free to write about anything, I agree. There are no stories that only certain people or groups of people can tell. But that worm still chews my heart every time I read about a writer.

The story was too disjointed for my liking. Whenever a novel jumps from one place and time to another, from one character to the next, I feel like I'm in high school again. I'm being asked to memorize all these important facts because a test is coming,and I will fail it if I miss something. Well, Mr. Hill, I failed, so I bailed.

I realize now that I hate preachy novels, the kind of fiction that tries to teach me important truths about the world but ends up either spewing forth thinly veiled propaganda or platitudes. Hill never fails to let you know his views on many subjects. What he fails at is crafting an interesting, tightly written story populated by characters that you care about. I didn't care about any of his characters.

Now for the specifics.

The scene at Sam's office with Laura is beyond ridiculous. Sam either has mental problems or he isn't very smart. No professor would negotiate with a cheating student the way he and Laura did. The author wrote a grotesque scene, almost Kafkaesque in its stupidity. All Sam had to do was stick an academic violation form in Laura's face. Either she signs it and accepts the penalty, or she doesn't, and the case goes to the university panel (being a professor myself I speak from personal experience). Instead, Sam allowed her to negotiate and finally stooped to insulting her. I will just assume the author has no idea how universities work or he wrote an absurd scene as a grossly exaggerated parody of the university system. Because if not, that opens a whole new can of worms (like he knowingly wrote rubbish to advance his absurd plot and create caricatures instead of characters).

The homosexual scene between two eleven-year-old boys... I don't know... What was the point? Sam was clearly not gay (maybe I missed something). He loved Bethany. So, he would acquiesce to sex with her twin brother? Really? I guess it's possible. Maybe I need to expand my horizons. I just didn't see the need for it. Bish was gay, apparently. He took his pants off in the headmaster's office and bent over. I'm not sure if he was inviting the headmaster to have sex with him? Or was he raped? His dad was rich and powerful and didn't come after the headmaster? A child was raped, and the rapist wasn't punished? No one even asked questions? Seriously?

The episode with the Berg and porn magazines is also ridiculous. Bish snapped a few Polaroids as proof that the Berg was looking at porn? I'm sorry, Nathan, but have you ever seen a Polaroid picture? Do you know what size those are? You can't see anything in a magazine snapshot taken from a few yards away. A Polaroid of the Berg looking at porn magazines would have looked like a blurry snapshot of someone (maybe the Berg - it wouldn't be easy to tell from a few yards away in poor lighting) looking at some printed material. To see pictures of male organs in that printed material would have been out of the question. Did the Berg pose for Bish to take all those Polaroids? Was he really that dumb? Like Harry and Marv in Home Alone 2? Besides, the whole idea that Bishop would use the Polaroids to blackmail the Berg into submission makes no sense. It would have been easy for the Berg to catch and beat Bish up so badly later when he got out of that stairwell. Bish would have been a vegetable for the rest of his life. The sharpest Polaroids wouldn't have protected him. Sorry, but my disbelief refuses to hang suspended.

Sam's love for Bethany was well done. I remember myself at that age. I could relate to his feelings. I also loved the description of Bethany's music. The descriptions in this novel were rich and beautiful. However, the author tended to overdo them and stop the story dead in its tracks. For example, was it necessary to describe the inside of a cathedral? Most of us know what it looks like. For those who don't, the description won't help. I wished the author had moved to Sam's feeling about Bethany's concert quicker.

The scene with Sam, his mother, and the lawyer was again Kafkaesque. The premise was interesting but it was done in such an absurd manner that I wonder if this was meant as a parody. The sweating lawyer and Sam's unresponsive mother create a perfectly maddening backdrop.

The scene where Sam's mother (still a teenager) unbuckled his future father and groped his penis.... What was that supposed to mean? That Sam's mother was uninhibited from early on? And Harry was outraged that she touched his penis? Really? I mean, really? I'm sure that's a normal reaction of a healthy young man when the girl he loves and craves touches his private parts. (Not to mention that he waited for her to unbuckle him first and then got outraged like he had no ideas what she had in mind. The amount of ridiculousness in his novel blows my mind.)

All that mythological mumbo-jumbo about the nix and the evil spirits had me yawning and wanting to speed up the audiobook.

I bugged out at the description of posters on the walls in the home ec classroom. I'm sorry, but that was disgusting. The end.

Not for me. Sorry.