I imagine E.L. Konigsburg was a very chatty person, because this characteristic shows up in her narrators. This can be both amusing, as well as annoying sometimes. The narrator for this book is a 13-year-old kid, and boy does he talk a lot. Sometimes I was laughing, and other times I would think, "Damn, this kid talks too much." In fact, Connor is made to talk so much, that by chapter 7 or so, I had already figured out the mystery...and I still had like 18 chapters to go. Of those 18 chapters, some consisted of Connor's investigations or findings, while others were just Connor narrating stuff. Personally, I feel this book could have been at least 50 pages shorter than what it is. The constant rambling made me finally start to skim through the chapters. Also, I feel that some of the characters should have had more scenes in the story. Several characters were mentioned who really shape Branwell's experiences and stuff, but we mainly only hear about them. That's kind of a bummer. =/ Regardless of my rant though, I think this book has more stuff for parents to read than for kids. It can bring a lot of things to light that parents may not realize affect their children (such as childcare, divorce, remarriage, puberty, etc). I hope this book will especially make parents think twice about how their children are being cared for.

A brilliant YA look at a much more complex depiction of abuse than 'issue books' usually give us. Well written and engrossing, funny at times, and at other times terrifying and sad. Well worth the read.