Rapp, Adam. Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

It looks like the other trend in YA novels, besides first-person present-tense, is the double-linear narrative where "what happened before" and "what is happening now" run in two lines that meet at the end. Like Private Peaceful and The First Part Last. It's a clever way of structuring a book in which the line of action doesn't have a natural climax, although it works better in books where it leads up to some kind of revelation about the past--unlike here.

Under the Wolf, Under the Dog is about Emo McAngstyPants Steve Nugent. He is in a residential psychiatric/rehab facility where some of the residents are drug addicts and some tried to kill themselves. Emo Steve has taken a lot of drugs and been wildly self-destructive, but he doesn't fit neatly into either of those categories. His mother died of cancer, and his brother hanged himself, and so Steve became kind of psycho and very depressed.

(Do I mock those with depression or other mental illnesses? I do not. But it cuts close to the bone, and with this much angst, you either make fun of it or you go crazy).

The storyline interweaves Steve's increasingly stupid and self-destructive behavior and the darkness of his life with brief scenes from the residential facility: his friend Shannon, his crush object Starla, his therapists. But these scenes don't really seem to gel or cohere, and so at the end, there's not as much sense of resolution as I would like (keeping in mind that literary novels don't generally require as much closure as genre novels, and I'm not really used to novels that don't resolve).

The past scenes are pretty brutal and compelling, not oversentimentalized, and not--despite my snark--overly angsty, because they're so simple and direct: actions, not thoughts, and certainly not feelings. But they hang pretty heavy. It's a book that makes me flinch: I don't need to hear this. I don't want to hear this. Which is not to say that it's a bad book. It's quite good. But I don't usually feel like reading about this much misery.