Twisted :Laurie Halse Anderson
It keeps coming back just like a boomerang, it just keeps coming back. I don't know if I have become obsessed with this or its just mere co-incidences but death\suicide\lost teenagers seem to be regular visitor on my booklist. But the only thing I can say that was different this time is that there was 'hope'. Before this book I have gone through experiencing people losing every hope they had to survive, broken beyond repair to be able to get through what was going on, eventually ending up extinct. But 'Twisted' tells a tale of recovery, not the process in general or a memo on how-to-not-lose-your-head, but the possibility of there being another way out.
Its true that I found this book on a list of "books similar to 'Thirteen Reasons Why' " , and the reason behind it was sufficiently complicated enough, even for me to understand. Maybe I have earned an obsession to these things until the point that I figure out every aspect and detail there is to it, the various reasons, their possible solutions and last of all the consequences. Makes me think maybe I should have studied Psychology. But who says you need to go through a college or a degree course just because you feel interested enough to know more (maybe if I were a Vampire and had a few decades or if I was a lucky one than a few hundreds to spare for education, I would have definitely given it a try).
"I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at."
Coming back to "Twisted" , The title is explicit, there really could not have been an apt title that could have said it in just a word. "Twisted" is a story of "Tyler", a teenager who like every other has a lot of issues, mostly concerning his parents (father specifically). What makes it different than the other teenagers is that instead of the him feeling that he is the one only cornered, he actually is the one who is being cornered here. But you still can't blame others, a bad reputation tends to do that sometimes. In his case it was spray painting on his School walls some rude stuff, that too with spelling errors. His 'foul deed' as he call it put him on probation and community service along with the permanent entry in the bad records of every authority figure which weirdly includes his Dad (not in the literal sense of authority there).
And just as pointed out earlier bad reputation can have some very serious ill effects to it, Tyler gets blamed for a serious activity which is also being proclaimed as a crime, and thus he is being accused of being a criminal which certainly doesn't do much to raise his already declining morale.
But it serves the purpose of highlighting every tardiness on his account, every slip, every class he missed, in other words even picking-his-nose is being considered a felony. He is being blamed for such atrocious behavior at all ends that at times even it makes him doubt that he really must have done all those things he is being blamed for, maybe in sleep, maybe he was sleep-walking or maybe someone drugged him. Having lived the same way ever since seventh grade, which was the first time he ever had the concept of 'what it must feel like to kill himself and see others regretting messing up with him would mean' entered his brain, he figures out that among the options available to him, this was by far the easiest and most tempting one.
He steals his father's gun along with a few bullets and a wad of cash but ends up throwing them in a chemical plant upstream ( the gun and the bullets). He is tempted from time to time later to use his freeway pass but something holds him up. At times its silly small bits like 'not leaving the mess on the carpet for mom to clean', 'not being a extra cleaning work to the janitors who have been very kind to him during his probational work with them', or simply 'an embarrassing autopsy report', but its pretty sure the reason holding him back is bigger and obvious than these.
The books ends with him resolving his issues with the bad grades in school and mostly his problems concerning his father, which is dealt with sufficient emotions, making it sarcastic and humorous in the beginning and eventual ending it up with tears. But the whole point remains - "He got out!" , He overcame the hurdles and found his way out of the labyrinth, which so many others fail to conquer. Which means theres always hope. No matter how big and complicated the labyrinth might be and no matter how lost and tired you might be, there is always a light at the end, that points to the EXIT and it ain't the one you had plainly in mind but the one you had subconsciously wanted, but hidden it behind all the hopeless thoughts.
"I scared myself, because once you've thought long and hard enough about doing something that is colossally stupid, you feel like you've actually done it, and then you're never quite sure what your limits are."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Twisted)
