Quote: The Best Hardcore Band in PA is a coming-of-age YA story with hints of Deposing Nathan.

Cyrus is gay and has feelings for his best friend Jeff, who lives with his mom and his ‘devoted to church’ stepf*ck (as Cyrus calls him). The boys’ lives are far from easy. They live in a conservative town in central Pennsylvania, Cyrus’ mom is dead and his dad works a lot. Jeff’s dad is an alcoholic who moved to Florida, and his stepdad Roland is an a*hole.

I wanted to hug those boys so many times. For being alone. For not being accepted. For being abused. And sometimes, I wanted to shake them up badly. For using so much weed at fifteen. For messing up so many things. But they were just teens figuring out life, and then I wanted to hug and protect them again.

While reading the first half of the book, I doubted the writing. But when I started reading the second half, I understood what Bill Elenbark was trying to do because I remembered he had done the same thing in his debut, I Will Be Okay.

In the story's first half, Cyrus and Jeff are fifteen/sixteen-year-olds figuring out their feelings. Hot-headed and confused, they do messy, thoughtless things while hormones rush through their teenage bodies. All these things are palpable in the writing. Long, descriptive, and poetic sentences that made me feel all the feels. But simultaneously, those long sentences (over 50 words) made me gasp for breath, and I hardly had time to figure out all those words and sentence parts between commas and more commas. On the contrary, the dialogues were blunt and scarce. Sometimes there was hardly any dialogue at all. The world of fifteen-year-olds. Yep. Caught in their heads, not communicating at all.

In the second half, Cyrus and Jeff are (almost) eighteen-year-olds, spreading out their wings, ready to go to college. Suddenly there’s more dialogue and the conversations are far more about feelings. There’s still messiness because, hey, eighteen-year-olds still haven’t figured out life (but who has?), and pain from the past resurfaces.

The moment I understood what Bill was trying to do, I liked the story way, way more, and I know that in a year or so, I’ll still be thinking about those two boys. I’m still not sure if everyone will understand this kind of writing, but it definitely fits the story.

This book is dark and complex. Don’t expect it to be a romance. It isn’t. The reference to Deposing Nathan is for a reason. The ending made me a sobbing mess. But there were also highlights. Cody was just a ray of sunshine. Sweet and cute Californian Cody. His conversations with Cyrus through Facetime were so precious.