Inexcusable by Chris Lynch

Wow. Eerie. A great example of an unreliable narrator. For a few pages, I believed him. He's a good guy. A football player. When he tackled that guy and crippled him, he was just doing his job. Right? And then the case against him started building. I wanted to believe him, that the demolished statue was the doing of another group of hoodlums that arrived after his friends did a little vandalism for fun. He was a lovable, good guy. People liked him.

The book opens with the rape scene. And at first, the reader doesn't really know what happened. Gigi is saying she was raped, and Keir is telling her she is wrong. He seems to really believe that a rape did not occur. They're good friends, he loves her. And I wondered why, after she was raped, she was still in a room alone with her rapist, discussing whether or not the encounter was consensual. As the story continues, and you learn more about Keir and just how deluded he is, you begin to understand. It is truly frightening. And it makes me worry about my sisters.

And, I'm pretty upset because my dog decided to break into our closet, seek this book out and read it himself. So, I'm sorry Cailly - we'll have to buy you your own. But, it is worth it. It's a fast read, mostly because you find yourself burning through the backstory pages to figure out what exactly happened to Gigi. But, the brilliance in writing is all in the backstory. Little by little you start to see who Keir is, and what his family is truly like, and by the end you are feeling very scared for Gigi, and by the last scene - everything makes sense.