Boys In the Trees

Reading this book was a bit like developing photos in a darkroom and waiting for shapes and textures to emerge before your eyes. Or looking at a charcoal sketch so smudged it obscures the visual. 

I loved the concept of the novel - providing points of view from different townspeople about a horrific event.  

But I found the writing technique so indirect it was frustrating.

Most of the time you need to decipher whose point of view it is; what's happening and where you are in the timeline of the story. 

There is a scene in the novel with children in a classroom - they aren't sure what they are looking at because the teacher has turned the entire room into a pinhole camera and they are viewing things in shadow and upside-down.  A pretty good metaphor for the book itself.

Highly intriguing but vaguely unsatisfying.