Breaking Point -- Alex Flinn

There was something about this book that didn't sit right with me--I'm not sure exactly what it was, but I'll try to figure it out--and then explain...

This is the prologue:

Happy birthday to me.

The metal door slams behind me.  I am on the outside.  Mom starts to hug me but draws back when the guard shoves my release paperwork across the desk for me to sign.  Two years ago, Mom filled everything out for me.  But now I am an adult--at least in the eyes of the law.  Old enough to be held fully accountable for my actions.

Some people say age doesn't matter.  I should have paid more for what I did, even though I was only fifteen. 

Maybe they're right.  But they don't know what I've paid--inside my head, where it matters.

And doing the right thing isn't always easy.  Maybe it's just been too long since they were in high school.  Maybe they don't remember what it was like.

Or maybe they didn't go to school with someone like Charlie Good.

The narrator, Paul Richmond, is the new kid at a private school populated almost solely by extremely wealthy kids.  His mom is the new secretary, so he is there for free.  They'd never have been able to afford it otherwise--Paul's parents have just divorced and his mother got NOTHING.

Almost immediately, he's targeted and tormented.  School is so miserable that he takes to calling his father nightly.  His calls are never answered, messages are never returned.  Things at home are equally bad:  His mother is so clingy that she moves Paul's computer into the living room, preventing him from contacting his only friends--the people he converses with in chat rooms.

Enter Charlie Good.  The golden boy.  Everyone adores him.  And he wants to be friends with Paul.  People think that Charlie's life is perfect, but Paul finds out that isn't true.  Charlie tells Paul things that he's never told anyone else--about the pressure his father has put on him to become a world class tennis player.  About the fact that his father isn't really his father.

Okay.  Fast-forward to the end.  Don't read this if you don't want spoilers.  Basically, Charlie convinces Paul that they should plant a bomb in the school, that he's thought it all out, no one will get hurt, it's just shake people up.  It'll show them.

Of course, Paul takes the fall.  Charlie has engineered the entire thing so that he is completely blameless--he didn't know a thing about it--it was all Paul.

I think that I felt weird about it for a few reasons.  One was that Paul was NOT a sympathetic character--he was so weak that it was hard to even like him.  I empathized with his plight, but I still didn't like him.  I also was slightly annoyed because across the board, Paul's personality fit the profile.  It felt like the author had a list of school shooter personality traits in front of her while she was writing.  But I could deal with that. 

I'm assuming that Alex Flinn was trying to get into the mindset of someone that could get to this breaking point--to the point where putting a bomb in school looked like a logical thing to do.  But since it was one of Paul's tormentors who convinced him to do it, it just didn't feel right to me.  It would have made more sense if Paul had made friends with another outcast and done it.  But having Charlie engineer the entire situation, it removed a lot of the blame from Paul.  Not completely, obviously--that's where the weakness of character fits in.  But to a large extent.  I don't know.  I still haven't figured it all out.  But I think that Give a Boy a Gun worked better.