Grasp Freewill Articulated By Chris Lynch Depicted In Electronic Format

was good I think This book was okay, I spent the whole book believing that Will may be hearing voices that were making him the "angel of death", When he ends that thought in the end by scaring that boy from his fan club, I was confused, I'm not sure how I wanted this book to end, but I'm also confused about it ending so simply, I picked up this short novel from the returns when the description on the back piqued my interest, It was underwhelming While the premise teens are dying and strange carved totems appear just after or before their deaths is interesting, the story just doesn't deliver, Told in second person streamofconsciousness, the book just never really gets anywhere, I am ok with books that are layered and the reader isn't really clear what's "real" and what's just in the protagonist's head, but I found this one confusing and not particularly satisfying.
Will is a tormented teen dealing with the deaths of his father, stepmother, and several classmates in this obtuse story, I remember hearing people talking about this book when it came out, and figured it was worth a read, since it won a Printz honor, and I've liked his other books.
When I finished, I had to look at the reviews to figure out what the hell anyone liked about it, The PW review summed up my feelings precisely: "this airless novel does not reward the effort required to penetrate it, "

I found the secondperson narrative to be a bit offputting in the beginning, but not insurmountable, The main question posed by the novel, can you ever know what's in the mind of another person, is potentially profound, but the probing here is clumsy and unsatisfying, I found myself hoping that he was a serial killer, THAT would have been much more satisfying a perfect picture of a truly disturbed individual,.

Freewill is a Printz honor and one of those books that you appreciate what the book is trying to do more than enjoy the execution,

Told in the second person, in a sparse and almost repetitive cadence, the story is about Will, who is disconnected from life and whose only outlet seems to be strange woodwork projects that he doesn't even particularly enjoy.
When the wood totems show up in a series of suicides, unwanted attention is drawn to him and he must decide if he should speak up or let himself become part of the nothing he feels he has to live for.


I think Lynch made a lot of smart choices in framing, While many people would find the "you" offputting, it helps reinforce the reader's own questions, However, Will is still so much a nonentity and passive character that he is neither a proper cypher for the reader to insert their own desires into nor interesting enough to carry the story's odd and morbid tone the way the narrators of Silver Linings Playbook or Perks of Being a Wallflower manage.


The other characters don't work as complex or lively characters either, partially from the remoteness of Will's relationship with them, This leaves most of their discussions feeling like talking points of the plot, antisuicide PSAs rather than their own motivations,

This novel is not without compelling moments, While the choice to make the prose simple and sparse, Lynch has passages that are vivid, One example that made me take notice was when Will was taking a shower after forgetting clean himself for three days and remarks on the wonderful feeling of scrubbing skin, reminding himself to remember it because it's a nice small pleasure that is easily forgotten.


Unfortunately, the sparseness

and the vagueness work against the story more than help it, The mystery of the totems and the suicides are left unresolved or even commented it on, as the story winds off into a palatable nonending where Will finally makes a choice not to be so passive.
I do like an openendedness to my stories, but there's not enough to structure to make the suggestion of possibilities, On the bright side, the story is a brisk novella more than anything else and there are some passages that create a thoughtful starting point for the weighty topic,

And perhaps that is all that Freewill wanted to do, was to present the reader with a choice to do so, . . Will, the seventeenyearold protagonist of Chris Lynchs YA novel Freewill has suffered a horrible tragedy, Now he lives with his grandparents who are “Kind people, They didnt have to take you in, Or did they Love Is it love Charity, ”

Thats the first thing about Freewill: its written in the second person, Not many books are and I suspect that many YA readers will wonder what the heck is going on, Once Wills circumstances reveal themselves, readers will likely be able to figure out why Lynch chose this point of view, At the very least, it would be an interesting conversation to have with students, But second person is a stylistic choice and not everyone grooves to it,

Will, as a character, is frustrating and sympathetic, He spends most of his time in woodshop, where he clearly has some talent, He makes furniture and carves little statues which start showing up in advance of the deaths of local students, He doesnt have any friends until he meets Angela, another misfit in his woodworking class,

Has she spoken to you before You know her name, though, dont you Havent bothered knowing any of the others, Whats the use, after all, But you havent been able to not know Angela,

The novel works as a sort of interior monologue as Will comes to grips with the facts of his life, Hes stuck in limbo. He tells his teacher “Im supposed to be a pilot, Mr, Jacks. How did I wind up in woodshop”

The how reveals itself sort of relatively quickly, but Wills mental health is clearly in jeopardy and it will take a while before the whole thing plays out.


I didnt love this book, but that doesnt mean its without merit, Mature, patient reads will likely get something from the reading experience, DNF at aroundpages.

I'm usually a sucker for heavily stylized writing, which is why I'm surprised to say I couldn't get into Freewill's writing at all,

The biggest problem with Freewill's writing is its use of second person, You are a guy named Will, you think and act like Will, you behave like Will, etc, Will is a teen with problems, so he would already be hard to relate to and understand but now that you are Will, it's not just that you need to hold the picture of Will and the plot in your mind, you also need to imagine being him, changing you identity and personality so that you're this guy named Will.


But then the way Will fits into the story makes the writing even harder to get into it feels like you're missing something Will knows, which is jarring since, well, you're Will.
Add to that the fact that everything is distant and nothing immediate and you have no idea what's going on, and the result is, Freewill is incredibly hard to get into.


As for the idea of the story, it sounds awesome, Explorations of free will Great! A secondperson narrative to make you feel like you don't have any free will Interesting idea, but I need to feel INVESTED in the story in some way or other.
Not by being dragged around blindly,

I'm sorry to say this, but I won't be finishing Freewill, This is exactly the type of book I would expect to win awards Printz Honorand have a,rating on Goodreads. Brilliant use of language and the second person, A deep dive into grief and mental illness and some of the ways our current system fails in those situations, Deep, but brief, and thus so, so intense, It is also never completely clear plot is foggy, setting is foggy except for one or two that are eerily focused, This is a character driven book, but the character is unreliable and confused and struggling himself, Brilliant. But I didn't enjoy it a bit, This was not an easy read, or a fun read, or a clear read, I read it quickly, but I'm not altogether sure whether I was engaged, or afraid of what might happen, or just wanted to be done, What did I just readyear old Will attends a “special school” where he takes woodshop, He claims he is supposed to be a pilot and is in the wrong school, In shop he makes sculptures that later appear at the sites of suicides though he doesnt remember putting them there, Throughout the book it is unclear if Will has had a psychotic break and talks to himself and a make believe girl, Or if he has brain damage and does not see reality, Or is he “death. ” I left this book feeling perplexed about how it won a Printz honor, What honestly was this book More importantly, how did this book win ANY kind of award These are questions that I found myself asking after I finished thispage booklet.


I picked this up on my summer vacation to the beach and i was like 'eh why not' Mainly the Pintz Award and the cover art sold the book to me.
I knew that John Green had won a Pintz Award for Finding Alaska, but SOMEHOW not for The Fault in our WTF So I picked this baby up, Note to self: READ PART OF THE BOOK IN BOOK STORE,

The grammar amp verbiage in this book is SO WEIRD, This is written in SECOND person What Who does that Apparently Chris Lynch Does that, Why WHY! Why doesn't EVERYONE just write in third person I can't stand First person, Well now, guess what, there's something, worse, SECOND PERSON.

YOU, as in, I, as in Will, is the lead character, is me, . . What

Who was the narrator Who is, . . WE You'll never find out, EVERRR Further more, we don't ever get a setting, Never! What I thought this was dystopian for a while, nope, I think its just every day, normal vocational school setting by just 'a beach'

Kids are dying from Suicide, SPOILER ALERT: We NEVER FIND OUT WHY, What WHAT! Everything is just like ok in the end because I think Chris Lynch was just done writing

Here's what I get, I get that, I, Will, was suffering from depression and he, me, was a little bit crazy, I get that he was also the subject of school pranks, The person in charge of those pranks We never find out, NO RESOLUTION EVER! I also get that he was grieving over his father's death and his mothers death,

I did like Angela as a character, She was straight up. I liked that she wasn't white, though, why do all black characters have to be sporty Why couldn't she be an artist or be a baker Why did she have to be a track star She was like me, as in positive no nonsense but no, I was Will cause this was in WEIRD second person writing style.
Angela was great and made thisverses one star,

Look I expect books to have basic things like the following
Backstory
Setting
Characters
Character development and or arch that goes with a reason behind it
Clear dialogue
Clear writing and grammar

Freewill like did not have a lot of the basic things.
Because of that, I was soooo confused so I didn't get the POINT of the book, I feel like the POINT could have been so impactful, but I was being a dummy and confused about who was talking, and where we were, and what the back story was.
I couldn't keep up.

I didn't get it, You know why CAUSE IT'S WRITTEN IN CONFUSING AS HELL SECOND PERSON! I just didn't get this book,

Unfortunately. Now, I'm really going to question this, "The Michael L, Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature" from now on /
This is a short book that can be read in a single sitting, but it can also be pretty emotionally draining.
I was a little putoff at first by the odd style of writing the narrative is done in second person, but I got used to it after a while, and it does well with exhibiting the protagonist's implied schizophrenia.
It was unlike any book I have ever read in the way the narrative was presented, the plot is never really explained, the entire narrative takes place in a very surreal way inside the protagonist's head, it's simply put there for you to figure out with a very unique semiconscious and typically philosophical writing style.
Not good. Not even close.

The author sets up a really eerie mystery with an amnesiac schizophrenic teenage loser stuck in the middle, yet fails to provide any sort of conclusion to said mystery.
I'm fairly certain he just couldn't figure out how to tie all the increasingly bizarre plot points together, so he just had the main character go swimming in the ocean, come to some realization about the meaning of life, and then, bam, the book ends.


The narration is very obnoxious, with the main character having a nearcontinuous dialogue with the voice in his head, I swear, half the sentences in this book were questions which became very annoying to read, The premise is certainly eerie, but it's so illdefined that I couldn't be bothered to feel, I felt nothing for any of these characters: not the grandparents, not Angela, not the dead teenagers, and certainly not the main character, Will, who reads like the poster child for the emo movement.
He is lazy, whiny, and drives away anyone who tries to get close to him, Most damning of all, though, he is boring, Reading about this jerk was exhausting, and I did not like him at all, I'm totally fine with reading about characters I disagree with or would not be friends with in real life, but this was almost painful,

Lastly, this book elicited not a single emotion from me except anger that I wasted my time, The story was so lifeless and never amounted to anything except bunches of words on a page,

Sorry I didn't like your book, Mr, Lynch. Maybe next time, try to wrap up your story before ending on a big middlefinger to your audience, and create some characters that talk and act like actual people, And, please, no more question marks, A deceptive book, indeed. I think I made the mistake of reading it in two sittings, I found myself utterly confused by the end of the book, I might have appreciated the book if I would have spent more time on it, but I wasn't compelled to, I finished this book with the "WTF just happened" feeling common to readers, judging by the other reviews on Goodreads, I'm as guilty as anyone of dismissing books I don't understand as trash hello, Ulysses but something about Freewill makes me want to dig deeper and understand.
The second person POV didn't bother me and I think was a brilliant choice to enhance the mental confusion that Will feels and the reader shares with him, You are supposed to feel disoriented, because he does, You are supposed to not know what he is responsible for, because that's the central concept Will himself is struggling with, He finally decides I think he isn't responsible for his father's death or for the actions of others, and that's why you never get a conclusion to the bizarre events that take place.
It doesn't matter. When he is committing suicide, he finds himself in remembering a grounding factthat he's a good swimmer, Somehow, by the end of the novel, he has put things into a context that stabilizes him, Accepting the concept of free will frees Will, . . hence the punny title I guess Lynch couldn't resist,

Do I get exactly how all of this works No, Do I think this book would baffle and annoy almost all young adults Yes, But I am done being annoyed and I'm willing to keep the book normally I only keepstar books in order to read it a few more times and see if it sinks in.
I'm giving itbecause it's
eitherstar orand I really can't decide which until I understand it, .