I am going to just come out and say it. I loved this book. Told from the perspective of Jake Upshore, a train wreck of a teenage boy almost à la Holden Caulfield but for the small facts that he lives in small town Nova Scotia, he's poor, learning disabled, a recovering alcoholic/addict and cobbled by his anger issues.

Here is a little bit of Jake's voice:
"Murderer. It's one kick in the belly of a word isn't it? Has a taste, too. It tastes like barbed wire and has wild hyena eyes. Murderer. Murder-her. Did he? Did I? That's when I remember what I want to forget."

We first meet Jake in a cemetery where he is hauled away by the police. A body is taken away in an ambulance. We don't know what he has done. We don't know what happened. But slowly his story starts to unravel. It begins when he was five years old, the year his mother died and he met and fell in love with Sky Derucci, the smart, beautiful, daughter of the local police chief. Who, by the way, does not like Jake, not at all.

Now they are almost out of high school and are secretly seeing each other. But when Sky disappears suddenly with rumours that she is pregnant, Jake goes ballistic. He has to find her, he has to help. With only pages from her journal to guide him, he follows her and ends up on a journey where he must confront his own demons.

Fitch's prose is fiercely lyrical, a roiling ocean of pathos and humour. The character of Jake so fleshed out, so beautifully flawed and self-sabotaging, so damn...lyrical (there is that word again) I could not put it down. Her ending though hopeful was not sitcom-y nor unrealistic. This is a coming of age story, a gorgeous, moving love story, heck it is almost poetry. Sheree Fitch has popped up on my radar with big neon letters, spelling YA CANLIT CANON!

Hmmm. I wish that had a better ring to it... ( )