Review: Dark and Gritty
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 17, 2014
"Dark and gritty" is the best way to describe this book. While this book is fiction, it's based on actual events. I live in a small town in northern Michigan, so the environment in which Noel and Terrell grow up is quite foreign to me. It's both terrifying and heartbreaking to know that some children really do grow up like these characters do, surrounded by drugs and guns and crime and murder. When my son turned 18, I bought him an iPhone. Terrell's mother gives her son a wallet, $5,000, and a gun. And a hooker.The chapters alternate narration between Noel and Terrell, and each chapter is headed by a line from later in the chapter designed to draw the reader in and make him/her keep reading. It worked; if I read the heading, I had to keep reading  because I was curious about the context of the heading sentence. It would have been helpful if the chapters been headed with the name of the narrating character. If I stopped reading at the end of a chapter and went back to the book later, I couldn't always immediately remember which character it was speaking when I picked the book back up.The grammar was rough in places, but this is one of those rare cases where I (mostly) didn't mind, because it fit the tone and style of the book. The story is told in a first person POV, so the language of both the narration and the dialogue has an urban slang feel to it. There's also one spot where a character is mentioned as if the reader should already know who she is, and then is introduced later in the chapter, which was a little disconcerting.That aside, "Blinded Thoughts" is one of those books that stays in your mind long after you've finished reading it. I was really drawn into these young men's lives. Much like real life, the ending isn't wrapped up and tied off with a pretty little bow, and there isn't a "happily ever after." This is not a book for the faint of heart. If it were a movie, it would be rated R. There's swearing, drug use, child abuse, guns, violent crimes up to and including murder, and some sexual situations. This is not an easy book to read, content-wise. (In terms of writing style, however, I flew through it in less than a day).  It is, however, a sad and tragic tale of how people's environments affect not just the choices they make (and the consequences of those choices), but also how it shapes the people they grow up to become.