Sarah Crossan did humanity a favour by writing such an important, heartbreaking story! Truly incredible!
The writing was, as I expected, beautiful and lyrical and the fact that it was written in verse just made it even more unique and perfect. Most of all I loved the way the situation wasn't presented in an overly emotional way. It was so purely realistic. It didn't have those 20-page-long descriptions of what happened and how everyone reacted to it. It consisted of right-to-the-point dialogues and quotes and it didn't left you time to sob with fancy words. It was exactly how it should be. Things were happening fast, like all tragic things always happen fast, and people don't react to them with long, grand thoughts and poetical words. They just instictively react to the shock and live with it for the rest of their life. That's how things go with life and that's how they went in this gorgeous book, as well. That doesn't make the book any less powerful, if anything, it just hits you harder.
Most importantly, this book carried out the sacred mission to speak up against goddamn death penalty and the unhumane character of the justice system. The Western world can't claim to be civilized when it condemns people to death. And, yes, that goes out to you, 30 of the American States that still keep the death penalty. How are we supposed to go on fighting for human rights when in some places, people are legally murdered to point out that it's illegal to murder people? There's something called life sentence going on in the world for horrible criminals and that can be used instead of killing people, you know. Just think that in a world where we're talking about how immoral it is to fry chickens, some still think it's ok to fry people on the electric chair. I think this book did a terrific job in pointing out how insane death penalty is in the raw way needed and I feel like it's a worthy decendent to Stephen King's 'Green Mile' and I would recommend both these books to anyone interested in outcries against death penalty.
Also, apart from death penalty, another extremely important issue adressed in this book is the irresponsible and superficial way police and courts work in some cases, with even police violence being mentioned. It's easy to point out the ''usual suspect'' with no actual investigation just to 'close the case' but it certaintly doesn't serve the justice and safety these sectors are asked to preserve.