"Coming-of-age slice of life, redemption, ensemble cast, quality writing, dark comedy, dissociative identity disorder, unhinged fiction, tragic beauty, magical realism."
This book is also known as Please Pick Up the Pieces of Me.
A boy with dissociative identity disorder, a PE student with intermittent explosive disorder, and a girl with cancer who keeps her illness a secret.
An absurd coincidence brings the three together, and they embark on a brief, ridiculous journey of redemption.
They say there's something wrong with my head, but I insist on turning the rest of my life into fireworks with my two "fellow patients"!
Shen Luodong: "I've never been alone."
[Luo] - the calm top student, responsible for coming first in exams;
[Jiale] - the wisecracking goofball, responsible for getting into trouble and livening things up;
[Ci] - a red-haired dissection maniac, responsible for "physically" dispatching scumbags;
[Xia Mengyao] - a five-year-old girl...
Tu Rongxi has intermittent explosive disorder and flips tables at the slightest provocation, yet saves her only tenderness for them.
An Muxun, the school belle and top student, is a sunny, depressed girl with a countdown on her life. She decides to give two "monsters" a taste of youth.
When a "madman" meets a "violent brute," with a "dying person" thrown in, Class 12 at Yuncheng Middle School goes completely off the rails:
- They fry pork belly in sesame oil during history class and get called out before the whole school;
- They take on four bullies in the cafeteria and bring in the SWAT team; ...
Later, they really do carry Shen Luodong into a five-star hotel on a stormy night, just to take a hot shower.
This isn't love, it's survival. This isn't healing, it's piecing each other back together. This isn't a legend, just three people rejected by the world trying to turn the days they have left into light for one another.
This book is one of the author's finest works from their breakdown period. After reading it, I feel like I'm going to develop a mental illness.
