Hartnett, Sonya. Surrender

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

In small-town Australia, Anwell chafes under the abuse and domination of his repressive parents. He meets a wild boy, Finnigan, as outcast as he himself is, and they forge a pact that holds them together through secrets, arson, and murder.

It's very hard to write a novel where the big twist is that the villain is the hero's father. Or where it turns out that the protagonist has been dead all along. If you are expecting a lot of big emotional payoff from your twist ending, you had better not use a twist ending that has also been used by a movie with, if not massive popularity, at least a whole lot of cult appeal. Fifty pages into the book, I was pretty sure about at least part of what was going on. This in itself wasn't necessarily such a bad thing, but it made the book's coyness, its reluctance to tell you anything straight-on, stand out all the more.


There's a lot of good in this book, and it works both as psychological character study and as a thriller. There's some beautiful writing; and then there are some passages that made me snicker a little with the purpleness of their prose, and there were some passages that were just plain frustrating. It's not impossible for a good novel to be so thoroughly confusing about What Really Happened, but it's a very hard thing, and I don't think it works here, even if it is the point.