Dirty Liar (review)

Benji recently left the home he shared with his mother and her boyfriend, Roy, in order to live with his father, stepmother, and their young daughter; though he'll only confide the truth to the notebooks in which he writes incessantly, his departure was due to Roy's sexual abuse. At his new high school, Benji, known disparagingly as "Dogboy," seeks largely to become "invisible to the demons" and to fly under the social radar, hanging out with other social misfits and liking it best when numbness overtakes the turmoil of his rage and guilt. He finds it hard to be numb, though, when pretty Rianna doesn't seem to find him as loathsome as he does, and their tentative relationship forces him to face human connections he's been trying to deny. James conveys with authenticity the relentless bitterness of a kid who feels he's nothing, even managing to capture the way self-abnegation can become romantic self-absorption, as Benji considers his pain to relieve him of accountability toward others and make him superior to the apparently happy. The book is unable, though, to muster the same power for Benji's eventual move towards recovery, so that his reaching out and moving beyond his pain weakens his character as well as the narrative; the mannered style and eccentric punctuation also sometimes draw more attention to themselves than to the story. Vrettos' Skin, reviewed below, is a more penetrating and nuanced exploration of a teen driven to depressed invisibility, but the book's sympathy and respect for its protagonist's pain may bolster similarly struggling teens.