Stephanie Kuehn Steps Up the Mind Games with When I Am Through with You

Charm & Strange
Kuehn kicked off her authorial career in the most impressive way possible: with a well-deserved 2014 Morris Award win for best debut novel. Charm & Strange introduces readers to Andrew Winston Winters, a boy experiencing so much internal struggle and pain it’s practically bursting out of his skin. In fact, he’s unsure just how much of an effect it’s having. When a body is found in the woods, Win isn’t sure whether he can claim his innocence; not with the violence that frequently takes over his being. As the book unfolds, readers learn just why and how Win became the intense, insular, potentially dangerous boy he is now, and eventually you realize you’ve been holding your breath for an hour while Kuehn has slowly eviscerated you and you somehow want to thank her for it.

Complicit
Somewhere along the way, Jamie’s sister Cate turned utterly terrifying, exhibiting behavior no one in the family could explain or control. It was a huge relief when she got sent to juvenile detention for arson, but now she’s out, and she’s coming for her brother. There are things she wants him to know about the time before she went away, and why she did—things that might make all the difference in how he feels about her. But the truth she’s desperate to share is one she was never supposed to unveil, and neither of them knows the price she might pay to come clean. This book straight up knocked me on my butt when I finished in a way only Tiffany Jackson’s Allegedly has managed to do since, and if you’ve read the latter but not Kuehn’s sophomore, you know you need to pick this one up ASAP.

Delicate Monsters
In Kuehn’s only multi-perspective novel, three teens with dark pasts are brought together when one, Sadie, is expelled from boarding school for her role in the near-death of a student and returns home to Sonoma, where brothers Emerson and Miles reside. Want to see how much a trio can make you squirm? Kuehn plumbs the depths of depravity, borne of everything from boredom to fear to guilt to trauma in an exploration of the way we hurt other people for very questionable emotional gain, and what those actions say about us as people.

The Smaller Evil
Though it’s obviously a book for teens, I still think of Kuehn’s fourth book as the Great Millennial Novel, simply because I think the themes resonate even more strongly with the next age or two up. Arman is seventeen and riddled with feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, which certainly aren’t helped by his toxic home life. In an effort to better his own self-esteem, he steals from his druggie stepfather to pay for attendance to an isolated self-help retreat in order to find his best self and perhaps rid himself of all the negativity and chronic illness that plague him. The leader of the cult-like compound, Beau, certainly draws Arman in, praising him for his success at everything the retreat has to offer. And though Arman doesn’t get it—he still has no understanding of what’s going on at the compound or what anything they’ve been doing is supposed to achieve—he thrives on being told he’s thriving. At least until Beau disappears, and all bets are off: the retreaters are in a downward spiral, and Arman is suddenly more on his own than he’s ever been, forced to trust he’s every bit as competent as Beau has told him he is.

When I Am Through with You
If you’ve somehow missed the running theme of “boys dealing with trauma and its aftermath” throughout these books, allow me to introduce you to Ben, who’ll tell you right off the bat that he killed his girlfriend, Rose. In fact, he’s telling you this from jail, and you’ll note the lack of remorse immediately. But what actually went down on the orienteering trip that ended in murder? Only Ben knows the truth, from how he and Rose first got together to what made him pull the trigger, and what went down with the classmates, their leader, and the possible fugitives they met along the way. This book was near impossible to put down, and stuck with me into my dreams that night. It’s one of the most compelling books I’ve read all year, and though Kuehn didn’t need a fifth reason to make her an instabuy authors in my book, I will definitely be picking up whatever book six may be.
Want even more Stephanie Kuehn? Make sure you check out her contribution to anthology Feral Youth when it releases on September 5!