When I Am Through With You by Stephanie Kuehn

Title: When I Am Through With You

Author: Stephanie Kuehn

Year Published: 2017

Link to Buy: Amazon

Genre: Fiction, YA, Suspense, Thriller, Crime, Twist Ending

Summary:

Ben Gibson is many things, but he’s not sorry and he’s not a liar. He will tell you exactly how what started as a simple school camping trip in the mountains ended the way it did. About who lived and who died. About who killed and who had the best of intentions. And he’ll tell you about Rose. But he’s going to tell you in his own time. Because after what happened on that mountain, time is the one thing he has plenty of. Smart, dark, and twisty, When I Am Through With You will leave readers wondering what it really means to do the right thing.

Ten Sentence Review:

I know I enjoyed this book because I couldn’t put it down until the final page. It surprised me constantly, from the unexpected (and sometimes downright dumb) choices every single character made to the way the pace and sense of urgency changed with each act of the story. It begins as a slow introduction to the characters and the finer points of orienteering, transitions to a frenzied and violent thriller, and ends almost abruptly back in Ben’s prison cell. Although Ben’s character growth was very deliberately commented upon, I still appreciated that he was introspective enough to experience growth at all. Then again, he started and ended adolescence by shooting someone in the head, so maybe he didn’t grow as much as I initially thought.

My two favorite parts both came at almost the end of the book: Tomas confessing everything to Ben, and Lucy visiting Ben in prison as his psychiatrist. The importance of forgiveness was just as heavy-handed as Ben’s development, but both these scenes showed Ben that not everyone will abandon him the way his parents had.

And then, of course, we get to the biggest twist of all: the money never existed, the preacher and his brother had never been escaped convicts, and Rose lied which lead to Archie’s death (and possibly everyone else’s too). We’ll never know Rose’s reason for lying about the money because Ben took it upon himself to end her suffering minutes before the rescue team arrived, but I’d be willing to bet they were more complicated than anything Ben assumed they were. He’s a little boy who would rather die than make decisions, who is suffering from chronic migraines and probably emotionally stuck at the age of his original trauma and injury, and then he finally decides to kill the girl to whom he’s said countless times he’s grateful for deciding everything since they started dating.

3.5/5, rounded down to 3/5 for GR.