Book club choice - but I'm really glad I read this one and if I'd ever had more time for pleasure reading, it would've been on a TBR pile anyway.
The book isn't for the fainthearted. I've been told it's not as bad as The Lovely Bones, at least not the first chapter of that one, but I think it's overall effect is much more disturbing in a long-lasting way. It's a story of betrayal, and the narrator's attempts at restitution for that childhood betrayal echoed a bit thin for me. I wasn't convinced he did enough to make up for his actions, even if he discovered that he wasn't fully responsible for the bad stuff in the book.
I don't care that he got beat within an inch of his life - he wouldn't have been there in the first place if he hadn't betrayed his friend as a child. Deciding to take the beating wasn't heroic, it was simply the wheel coming back around.
Well, as you might be able to tell, I really disliked this narrator, though I enjoyed the book and am glad that I read it. Perhaps that was the point however, to dislike the narrator. And the next book club book is Atonement, another book where I didn't really care for the narrator and didn't think she'd done much to atone for what she'd done wrong.