Year in (Book) Review: The Kindness of Strangers

Imagine the darkest thing you can that could happen to a child. Now, take it one shade deeper into blackness -- into the unimaginable, really -- and that's what we're asked to deal with in Katrina Kittle's The Kindness of Strangers. The name and the book jacket are lighthearted and lovely. The life of its youngest main character is anything but.

In turn, fortunately, Kittle's telling of his story is anything but bleak. It's impossible, I would have to believe, to write about crimes against children in an honest and raw way without making your readers very, very uncomfortable. I choose to write about things like bikini waxes gone bad and ill-behaved house pets, so clearly she has a level of maturity I've not yet found. But she tackles the issue head on, without ever tiptoeing around it or doing a disservice to her characters by not making us, as readers here by choice, go through the same crises they must face.

She leaves you guessing, nearly to the end, who you can root for and who you should spit on. Much in the same way middle-schooler Jordan wants so much to believe in the best in people, even in really, really bad people, Kittle makes us want that too. She sweeps us up in his adolescent need for normalcy and family, and reminds us those are needs we never outgrow. 

It's a beautiful telling of an ugly truth. 

Side note: Because I frequently make inexplicable and suspect choices, I read this book on vacation. While I highly recommend reading the book, I equally highly recommend not reading it on a beach.  It just feels weird.