 2008-10-30 - Alright...
This book was alright... The style it was written in was unique, yes...but I'm not sure I was fond of it. There was a lot of summing up involved in it as well...he seemed to go into detail about using drugs and then just summed up the outcome, it was a little strange. Near the end of the book I had no sympathy for him it just vanished...he's very arrogant. In the end I pushed myself to really finish reading because I was already halfway through. In any case, it was an alright book...I did learn some things from it but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
 2008-10-25 - Tweak by Nic Sheff
I totally enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it too. I enjoyed the author's honesty throughout the whole book that made it real, and worth reading. I learned a lot from this book even though I am a lot older than the author, I think he is an incredible person and a great writer, vivid and very interesting. I learned some things from him that I will keep for the rest of my life and share with my two sons. One who is an ex meth user and I hope for good. In fact, he is the one that told me to read the book after his father gave him "A Beautiful Boy by Nic's dad. I give this book the maximum stars!!!
 2008-10-06 - A Hardcore Look
This book was an honest, hardcore look at Nic's life as a drug addict. Nic was a talented, smart teenager who started drinking and taking drugs. This book describes in detail his life when he was using and in recovery. I read this after I read Beautiful Boy, and it was very interesting in that it filled in some of th gaps in Beautiful Boy. When Nic disappears for long periods of time in his father's book, he tells us what he was doing in Tweak.
Nic Sheff writes this book using his own language, the langueage he used when living on the streets and using. It is easy to read, but difficult to swallow. Tweak is a very scary book, because it is real. I highly recommend this book for every parent and every teenager that may think it is cool to try drugs.
 2008-09-12 - Poorly written, a shame.
I didn't finish this book. Not because I wasn't interested in the subject, but because the writing left me frustrated. I found the author's repetition of the phrase "or whatever..." to be very distracting. The book seemed to have been published after only one draft, and I didn't care about any person in it. Another "quirk" seemed to be a kind of laziness in the writing (though, as we get to know the author's tastes and heroes, it is understandable). Some examples of this are his constant use of the word "some" after such statements as 'it had begun to rain, or he had stopped crying or vomiting'. The same goes for "things". The word seemed to end every list of objects in the book. To me, these are small problems that could have been fixed by an editor. Perhaps, all involved were trying to portray the author as a scrappy Gen-Xer with no time on his hands to tune up his work, instead of keeping the reader at a distance by creating muddy prose. Fine, but after a hundred pages of this sort of thing, it wears thin. Mr. Sheff lost me, and therefore, I learned nothing from his tale.
 2008-09-11 - Skip Tweak and go to Beautiful Boy
I read Beautiful Boy and then Tweak and I found that the empathy I had for Nic went out the window when I read his personal account of his drug addiction. With his Father's book, I kept pulling for him to turn his life around. In reading his story, I kept hoping he would overdose and put his family and friends out of their misery. Be sure to read Beautiful Boy - you can skip Tweak.
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