The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us: Mark June Poirier (Editor)

I've never really understood people's desire to watch graphic, gruesome horror movies. Why would you willingly expose yourself to that kind of misery? Don't you just want to be glad it's not happening to you, and be glad that you don't have to know the horrible details of the vicious things that people can do to each other?

One might very well ask, then, why I volunteered to read and review Mark Jude Poirier's The Worst Years of Your Life, a collection of twenty-one short stories all about – as Poirier puts it – "the geeked-out, angst-ridden, lust-addled and deeply misunderstood adolescent in all of us." Yup, 375 pages of miserable teenagerhood. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Reading the book was a little like going through adolescence itself, on a much much smaller scale. Parts of it were excruciating. Parts were funny, and some parts were funny even though they shouldn't have been. A number of the stories haunted me after I had closed the book on them; it's been an interesting personal exercise to see which ones affected me and how. I bet you anything yours would be different.

Another thing I noticed was how well Poirier ordered the stories. It seemed to me as if the characters got a little older and more complex as the book progressed, even though they are completely unconnected stories. And there is a definite "climax" towards the end: a few increasingly disturbing stories that made me wonder if it was time to quit reading (that's the awesome thing about reading this stuff instead of living it, you know?). But, as with my own adolescence, I trucked through it and I am glad I did.
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Publisher: Simon & Schuster (August 21, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1416549269
ISBN-13: 978-1416549260
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