No one really knows who Andrew Winston Winters is. Least of all himself. He is part Win, a lonely teenager exiled to a remote boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts the whole world out, no matter the cost, because his darkest fear is of himself ...of the wolfish predator within. But he's also part Drew, the angry boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who, one fateful summer, was part of something so terrible it came close to destroying him.

CHARM & STRANGE is a deftly woven, elegant, unnerving psychological thriller about a boy at war with himself. Reading CHARM & STRANGE was a bit of a struggle for me because I don't normally read paranormal, sometimes it just doesn't really interest me to read it. CHARM & STRANGE requires a lot of patience and a reader who can sit and not really have a clue what's going on just to make it to the excellent conclusion.

The ending makes this book, it gives the story its strength, which makes the reader become restless waiting to find out what this weird little novel is working towards. I did enjoy reading CHARM & STRANGE it was defiantly a struggle to read but a good struggle I stood by the book and pushed through to find out what was going to happen to Win/ Drew.

CHARM & STRANGE is a story split into two: a tale from the past and present. The stories are about the same guy - Andrew Winston Winters (Drew/Win) - but they paint two very different before and after pictures. An angry young boy (Drew) spending a summer with his family, and a lonely teenager (Win) at a New England boarding school who is hiding dark secrets about the truth of his childhood and perhaps even the person he is.

Win is a weird, complicated and intriguing character from the very first page and he continued to tug at my heart strings and drive me insane throughout. The mysterious tone of the entire novel dragged me helplessly towards the end in my need to discover the underlying truths about Win and what happens at the full moon.

CHARM & STRANGE is full of questions and secrets, every corner you turn seems to lead you down an even more complex path with even bigger and darker questions begging to be answered. This is a brave and exciting book and makes you really think about the what ifs in Win's life. There will be a few readers who will not like it and some that will. Overall this was a great interesting read and I was glad to stick through it to see what would happen to Win/Drew.

Book Summary

When you’ve been kept caged in the dark, it’s impossible to see the forest for the trees. It’s impossible to see anything, really. Not without bars . . .

In Stephanie Kuehn's brilliant debut Charm & Strange, Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.

 

He’s part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost.

He’s part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable.

Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present.

Before the sun rises, he’ll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths—that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying.