Praise for Robert Cormier

Who here has heard of Robert Cormier? I kind of had....I knew he wrote fiction books for teens, but I'd never actually read any of them.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I read I am the Cheese in about two hours. I'm not trying to brag about my reading speed - I honestly could NOT put this book down! I was completely riveted from page one all the way until the end. It was a masterpiece!!!!

All right, here's my spoiler alert: I'm going to talk about the whole book, including the end, so if you haven't read it, please don't read ahead!!!! The twist ending is totally the best part of the book and trust me, you don't want to ruin it. If you've already read it or don't really care about reading it, read on!

When it started as Adam on his bike, I was like, "Ok, this is interesting. I'm really curious about what's going on here." As the recorded interview sessions began, I was like, "O-k, this is....interesting. I'm REALLY curious about what's going on here." Then the ending came, and I was like, "Say WHAT?!?!"

It turns out that throughout the entire book, Adam is just riding about his mental hospital! His parents are dead (well, at least his mom is) and the guy who killed them and put Adam in the institution was the man assigned to protect them! OMG!!! This is a classic twist ending; I feel like since this book, there's been a lot of movies and books where the character ends up to have been in a mental hospital the whole time. For example, I believe Shutter Island has a similar twist (I haven't actually seen that yet - I'm a little scared to, because I heard it's pretty creepy!)

Anyways, this is my first Robert Cormier experience, and I must say that it was great! I'm definitely going to look into his other books and read some of them. I heard The Chocolate War is good, so I think I'll delve into that one next!