2013 book 232

Matthew Quick's Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
Quick is the author of, I guess, Silver Linings Playbook and some other books, but this one doesn't make me want to read those. I mean, it made me get all teary at an airport, but I feel like it's a book I've read several times before. It's about troubled teen Leonard, who's planning to murder a classmate (for reasons we don't find out till like 3/4 of the way through, and though I found the reasons very upsetting, they weren't presented in a way to make them, like, powerful) and then kill himself. Leonard is a typical fictional troubled teen, where he's the only one who's DIFFERENT and the only one who can see through all the BULLSHIT and CONFORMITY. It's too bad Leonard didn't grow up in the 90s; we hated conformity and surely he'd have found some peers to relate to. There's also the typical cool/okay teacher, and the old neighbor who gets him into Humphrey Bogart movies. It's all pretty  . . .  I don't want to say predictable, but there aren't really any surprises (I was mildly surprised by some things the mother does, but not in a good way). Anyway, this was a perfectly fine book, if you want to read one of those books where a troubled teen plans a suicide, but I wasn't really into it. And there were waaaaayyyy too many footnotes. B/B-.