Come Sit By Me - Thomas Hoobler

ebook, 218 pages

Published July 15th 2015 by Booktrope

Paul and his father move to a quiet country town from New York City after Paul's mom died. The houses are big and cheap, the downside? Last year a high school student shot and killed 7 people. Now Paul is attending Hamilton High and is assigned the killer's old locker. After joining the school newspaper, Paul is assigned to write a memorial piece about the deceased, minus the killer, Cale, and he becomes obsessed. Nobody seems to know why Cale would kill kids he didn't even know, and more, they don't seem interested in finding out. Paul becomes determined to understand Cale and his motives even when it becomes dangerous. 

This is a promising story, but not all that original. The writing shows promise and with a little more substance I think this book could have been so much better. But my one big (well huge) problem with this book is Paul's obsession with breasts. Almost every chapter includes an in depth examination of some girls chest. The librarian, the cheerleaders, etc. "I did manage to sneak a look at her boobs, and was a little surprised to see that they didn't appear quite as big as before. Or perky. Or something. Well, they were still in the high percentile of breasts is observed up close, so I wasn't feeling buyer's remorse." Umm.. wow. Extremely degrading and stereotyped. 

Then there's Caleb's Book. The whole story was building up to this moment: the usb drive. If Paul just found the usb drive he would know why Caleb did what he did. And when he did... oh my. I get what the author was trying to do, really I do. Caleb isn't supposed to be the smartest kid ever, but really? The spelling is bad, yah ok. That would be fine and everything if it was just CONSISTENT. 

And that ending. Improbable to say the least. I really wanted to like this book, like really bad. It had promise, it started off going somewhere and then it got lost. This author has serious potential and I think that with some help this book could really be great. 2 stars. 

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.