Kill Me Now

Miles Lover is an imaginative but insecure adolescent skateboarder with an unfortunate nickname, about to face his first semester of high school in the fall. In Kill Me Now, Miles exists in a liminal space-between junior high and high school, and between three houses: his mother's, his father's, and the now vacant house his family used to call home in a leafy, green neighborhood of north Baltimore. Miles struggles against his parents, his younger identical twin sisters, his probation officer, his old friends, his summer reading list, and his personal essay assignment (having to keep a journal). More than anything, though, he wrestles with himself and the fears that come with growing up.

It's not until Miles begins a mutually beneficial friendship with a new elderly neighbor-whom his sisters spy on and suspect of murder-that he begins to find some understanding of lives different than his own, of the plain acceptance of true friends, and, maybe, just a little of himself in time to start a whole new year. When you're green, you grow, he learns. But when you're ripe, you rot.

With tenderness and tenacity, Timmy Reed's prose-written in a confessional tone via Miles's journal-captures the anguish and grit of adolescence, and the potential of growing up.