The character arcs of Julian and Paul was I think one of the best I have ever read! They are the classic embodiments of the ‘hate to love’ and ‘love to hate’ tropes. “He remembered the way love had burned through him like a flame under glass, grasping outward, devouring what air it had left before it choked.” The narration takes us deep into the psyche of these characters with such startling ease that I was amazed this was a debut. We readers are led in one direction and then left scrambling to reevaluate everything we thought we knew at the end. The way Nemerever gets into your minds through the characters of Julian and Paul and just twists everything up is scarily beautiful. Trigger and Content Warning : Toxic relationship, Murder, Emotional abuse,Suicide, Homophobia, Self harm, Sexual violence In a Nutshell But as their orbit compresses and their grip on one another tightens, they are drawn to an act of irrevocable violence that will force the young men to confront a shattering truth at the core of their relationship. And admiration isn’t the same as trust.Īs their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel. He idolizes his friend for his magnetic confidence. Paul sees the wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal-an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father’s recent death. When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another.

These violent delights book review