This book is amazing. It challenges the YA genre, in my opinion, because of all its intense emotion and tragedy and OH this book just gave me so many feelings. It's hard to organize my thoughts after having finished it.

There were some things that rubbed me the wrong way, as much as I loved and enjoyed this book. One was the voice, which I understand why it's written that way, but it's to such a great extent that it seems a bit gimmicky to me. Since they're his thoughts, and thoughts don't always mean words, why were words misspelled in his thoughts? I get the fact that he couldn't read, but it's easily understood without misspelled words in the descriptions. I'm being a bit nitpicky, sure, but it just made me cringe every time I saw the word "tho" instead of "though."

And the fact that the baddies were ALWAYS there and always, ALWAYS, a step ahead just started to annoy me after a while. How many times can one man pop out at them and how many times before it becomes less shocking and more irksome?

Okay, I'm done being critical because overall I loved this book. It was definitely a roller coaster of emotion. I cried and I smiled and laughed and shook my fists in frustration. Patrick Ness definitely is not afraid to censor violence and emotion but that didn't make the novel seem like one of those "violent without a clear reason as to why they're violent other than the fact that it's VIOLENCE and that's what's supposed to happen to make it seem mature, right?" Its violence was because of emotion. It seemed so gritty and real and everything was done for a reason and it all broke my heart about a thousand times.

I immediately went to the library to check out the other two in the trilogy. I could not put this book down and I'm already starting into the second installment.