Review: Great read, told from a teen boy's point of view!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 13, 2012
When I first read the synopsis of Crushed I was expecting the book to be something like a teen movie, you know... the ones where the teens are all wild and they get away with everything. Well, this book was able to weave that into a much more complicated story. This was something that I really appreciated, as it gave the book much more substance.Most of Crushed takes place in Harker, a boarding school that the main character and his friends attend. Immediately, I could tell that they were going to get into some crazy things... being alone and unsupervised, for the most part. While I hate teens that behave like they have no morals or self-control, and I hate reading about it even more, I wasn't very upset about it. Yes, it bothered me that they were being extremely promiscuous and were drinking so much alcohol, but I just let it go. Move on, Nancy. Anyways, the boarding school setting worked very well for the story. Taking the parents out of the picture for extended amounts of time sounds like the dream of every angry teenager out there. This worked very well for the main character and his friends.I wasn't expecting this, but I loved Fletch Colson. He was a much more complicated character than I thought he would be. He seemed like a womanizing jerk at the beginning, but OMG... he had feelings! I loved that! It was so interesting to see how he felt about his relationships with his friends, love interests, and his parents. Fletch was the way he was for a reason. He always had someone to please and I respected the fact that he did that. It's hard to ignore what others expect of you and do your own thing, but even harder to ignore what your heart really wants to do, and do what other people ask of you. I think he did a great job of keeping his head straight through it all.From the summary, it sounded like this book would really be focusing on Fletch's relationship with Ellie. However, I didn't really see that. Ellie was a prominent part of the story, but the focus was definitely on Fletch and what was going on inside his head. I'm not sure if this was done on purpose, but I ended up liking it a lot. I would have liked to learn more about the other characters, like Ellie. She seemed a bit distant, as I didn't really know much about her "story" and not much was said. She, along with some of the other characters, were glossed over a bit. They could have been developed a bit more. By developed I mean that they needed a little more back story and substance, something that would make the reader more interested in them. This wasn't a big issue for me, though, because my interest lay with Fletch and everything that was going on with him.Overall, I think Crushed ended up being very fun to read. As I said, I would have liked for some of the other characters to have been developed a bit more. Other than that, the book flowed very well and the pacing was excellent. I loved the main character and I think you can't go wrong with a book where the main character is someone that you actually want to read about.