Sixteen-year-old Andrew Winston Winters believes he has a monster inside him and is terrified of letting it out and hurting someone. Chapters labeled "matter" chronicle Win's life in the present at his Vermont boarding school, where he is obsessed with the monster's inevitable emergence. Even Chemistry, a subject at which he excels, cannot hold him: The particles of his life are in disarray. Although his former roommate, Lex, has been a jerk, his concern for Win is genuine. So, too, is new student Jordan's once she realizes Win needs help. Alternating chapters titled "antimatter" provide details about Win's life as middle child Drew in a family of three kids. At first, it seems that their father is merely controlling and unkind. But Drew, who is sometimes out of control, can almost always rely on his older brother, Kevin, and they all adore his little sister, Siobhan. The deeper author Stephanie Kuehn skillfully leads readers into the past, and the closer she looks at one particular summer, the more disturbing the picture becomes, until the tragedy of all three of the children's lives becomes undeniable. This deft and powerful novel exploring the impact of sexual abuse on children, and especially on one boy, is steeped in tragedy, but Win is a survivor. He feels guilty about this at the story's beginning: Kevin and Siobhan are gone. But by story's end, he is beginning to understand, and even embrace it, with more than resignation; with something leaning toward hope in a novel written with beautiful prose and a sense of quiet urgency. (Age 15 and older)

The 2014 Winner of the William C. Morris Award

When you've been kept caged in the dark, it's impossible to see the forest for the trees. It's impossible to see anything, really. Not without bars . . .

In Stephanie Kuehn's brilliant debut Charm & Strange, Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.

He's part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost.

He's part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable.
Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present.
Before the sun rises, he'll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths-that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying.