Word Revel

Actual rating: 4.5 stars
Initial thoughts: Clean is a very solid book. It explores life at a youth rehab from the perspective of five teenagers committed to it. They each battle with different addictions and have to face up to their problems. The writing varies from first-person prose to script-style to essays and to the more experimental. The various writing styles meshed together convey the dissonance that each of the characters feel as well as their jumbled thoughts. I think that this approach worked exceedingly well for this book.

The only thing that made Clean fall short of a perfect 5-star rating was the plot. It did progress and there were twists here and there but the final resolution didn't convince me. As expected, the story ended when the five of them were done at rehab. However, the lead up to "today is my last day here" and "tomorrow I'm going home" was very abrupt. It's like it just happened in order to wrap up the book. Nonetheless, Clean felt complete at the point it ended and made me feel for each one of the five.