I hope everyone had a lovely weekend! I spent mine reading, being lazy, and pretending like my birthday wasn't the most exciting time of the year. You know, like any other April weekend. Now I'm back with a book that...well, I'm going to let the synopsis explain it to you.
A normal teenager Dean Knight is not.
With a mental illness that threatens to take over his sanity; a sister who’s deep in her own problems; and a wasted mother who couldn’t care less about it all, Dean is left to battle real life on his own. School, bullies and medications are his realities.
Then there are also the ghosts, the hallucinations and of course – the monster.
In the middle of it all, when everything seems to lose purpose, hope comes shining down on Dean’s miserable life. Her name is Ella and for one reason or another, she actually wants to be close to Dean. With Ella’s help, the lost teenage boy decides that he could finally win a battle or two – both in real life and in his writing.
But hope is a tricky thing. And the monster seems to know that.
When secrets buried down for almost a decade come out in the open, what do you do?
When I first saw this book, I immediately went to Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24481636-fall-of-knight) to learn more about it because it sounded interesting, but I couldn't figure out if I wanted to read it. Goodreads told me I'd like it if I liked books by John Green and Rainbow Rowell. While I'm just eh with John Green, I love Rainbow Rowell, but this book is not like anything either of those authors have written. And I mean that in the best way possible.
Reading this book was, at times, confusing, depressing, and exhilarating, sometimes all those emotions at once. At first, I thought maybe it was hard to read, but then, the deeper I read into the novel, I realized that was the point. This book is told from Dean Knight's point of view, and Dean is a mental case. He's been diagnosed as bipolar, but that, as it ends up, might not be the case. Still, Steven Cross does an amazing job at portraying a mentally ill teenager. His writing made me feel like I was really seeing the world through Dean's eyes, and that made it difficult to know who to trust and who to like. Dean seemed like a really unreliable narrator, but he was just trying the best he could because even he didn't know who to trust or like because of the constant voices in his head telling him contradictory things. Dean's life is not a good one, and this poor kid seems to fall into the middle of everyone else's bad life, too.
No one answers when I pound again, so I try the knob. It turns and the door screeches open.
“Hello!” I call out as I poke my head in. I don’t see anyone, and I once again fight the urge to turn around and walk back out the door. Lou could be lying on the floor bleeding somewhere or convulsing from an overdose. I take a deep breath and step inside the trailer.
“Lou! Anyone home!”
The trailer is a single wide, so it isn’t very big. When you open the front door, you are in the living room, which is right next to a tiny kitchen. Down one hall is a bedroom. First, I survey the living room and kitchen and don’t see anything unusual. I walk past the kitchen toward one of the bedrooms. As I step closer to it, my heart thumps wildly. The bedroom door is closed, but I can hear muffled head-banging music, as if someone is listening to it through headphones at two hundred decibels, and I sigh with relief. I open the door. No Lou, but an MP3 player hooked to ear buds lies on the bed.
There might be a bathroom down the opposite hallway. Again, my heart thuds as I approach two doors, one on the right, a bathroom no doubt. I pause and look down. No pool of blood seeps from under the door. I grab the door handle, find it unlocked, and jerk it open. The bathroom is empty too. It’s dirtier than a public toilet at a crack house, and I feel like I want to throw up.
Quickly, I close the door. The last bedroom is all that remains. I don’t think he’s in there, but I check it anyway. As I suspect, the room is empty. This must be the master bedroom where Lou’s keepers live.
I still can’t fully shake my feeling of dread, but then I think Lou was probably just late to school, and while I was traipsing through the woods, he probably went on to school, and at this very moment, he and Ella are laughing their asses off.
I laugh a little too, but I also feel good about myself in another way. The old Dean wouldn’t have been too concerned with anyone else. I guess you could say the new Dean has learned to make a few friends. I realize how tired I really am from not only the walk but also the unbearable tension I have felt from thinking my friend is dead.
I sit on the couch―a little reluctantly because it’s pretty dirty, but then again our couch is secondhand, so I can’t be judging other people’s possessions. I think about how ridiculous I feel, and then I laugh aloud again.
I start to leave, but something outside the window catches my eye.
I stare for a long time, feeling unsure.
Lou swings from a tree outside the window; he’s hanged himself with an electrical cord.
See what I mean? Dean just wants to live a normal life, and that's not going to happen when you're bipolar, in and out of mental institutions, and your entire family - and the people around you - are messed up, as well.
This book was amazing. It made me cry, scream, and laugh, all at once. It's frustrating and you just want to reach through the pages and shake Dean, try to help him, but you have to continue on this path and let him self-destruct and hope that he will open his eyes. I would honestly recommend this book for all those who love YA, but are getting rather sick of the boy-meet-girl type stories. This does have a love story inside it, but it's twisted and sad. I'm serious, though. You people should buy this book. Rereading this, I feel like I'm not selling it well, but I cannot stop talking about this book and recommending it to so many people, because of the honest and frank portrayal of Dean and his illness.
So click on one of these links to go buy it! (I know: terrible transition.)
Also, get in touch with the author and tell him how much you love this book. Because you will. I just know it.
Steve Cross’s first successful writing project was a play about a werewolf that his eighth grade English class performed. Though the play was never published, the warm fuzzy feeling from its public performance has never quite left Cross, who continues to sink his teeth into a variety of writing projects. His first publication was a haiku, followed by two middle grade novels published by POD publishers and a young adult novel published by Buck’s County Publishing.
A fanatical St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan; a lover of all kinds of YA fiction, as well as the writings of Dean Koontz and Stephen King; a fan of all kinds of music – from Abba to the Zac Brown band, Cross dreams of the day he will write a best-selling novel or sell a screenplay for seven figures, so he can retire and write more best-selling fiction. Until that day, he and his wife Jean, Missourians born and bred, will continue to toil in the field of education and live in peace with their two dogs and two cats and wait around until their daughter Megan and son-in-law Sean give them grandchildren to spoil.
Social Medial links:
Also, click this link and enter for a chance to win a SIGNED copy of Fall of Knight. Good luck!
Now go, get out of here. I gave you everything you need to get this book. See you Friday!
