I loved it. I thought it was creepy, but not a stereotypical story about a sociopath and his helpless and/or clueless victims. The characters in the story were engaging (though not particularly likable) and multidimensional. I thought it was an interesting viewpoint as told through the stalker's eyes. There was little violence or sex, just suspense. (in my opinion.) It left me feeling a little disturbed and a little bit dirty.

This seemed promising, but I could not get past the first several pages. The writing, unfortunately, is just not very good. Sentences are awkwardly constructed, dialogue is dry and unconvincing, attempts at humor are contrived, and descriptions are extraneous and unimaginative.

Ugh. Like we need another book about a white boy (at Harvard, no less) with an overinflated sense of his own importance, or another book about a loner obsessed with a girl way above his league, or another book about the ways in which men repeatedly violate the boundaries and space women have set up. Even worse: when all three are in the same book. No thanks.

Conclusion - Still waters run deep. The book is full of too fancy phrases and sayings unclear about what are they; descriptions of sexual experiences of freshmen; unnecessary, in my opinion, descriptions of certain physiological deficiencies, for example - "dried snot in the nostril, that flaps when breathing, or - blackhead that was undergoing careful scrutiny after it was extruded.” Yuck.

What a great book! Loner by Teddy Wayne tells the tale of anomic Jewish boy, David Federman. David, 18, socially awkward, heads to Harvard with the hopes of carving out a fresh identity amongst the elites, leaving behind the lonely march of his high school years. One of the first nights on campus, David encounters -- from a distance -- beautiful Veronica Morgan Wells ("VMW"), the daughter of a New York socialite. David pays less and less attention to his budding group of friends as his obsession with VMW grows and he makes a clumsy reach for her by dating her bookish and attainable well-meaning roommate, Sara.

I picked this for a few reasons:

1. It's one of the shortest novels currently on my reading list, 192 pages.
2. I'm reading 3-4 other books, so I wanted something I thought was light and quick. It was a quick read because it was too good to put down, but not what I'd call light.
3. The short, punchy title was appealing.
4. I gravitate towards stories set on college campuses.

I was at first really put off by the first person perspective. But once I got used to the style, I took on David’s gaze and got lost in the story.

Loner definitely has some of the same elements as a thriller. The pacing will be familiar to fans of the genre. But, Loner is not a thriller (nor a teen novel, for that matter). It's adult fiction, the sobering character study of a spot-on stand-in for the emotionally stunted “Y” Generation. Teddy Wayne takes a risk by telling this story almost exclusively from the unreliable narrator's perspective, but a key glances from the other side help paint David not as the fearsome stalker caricature of popular drugstore thrillers, but an excruciatingly lonely boy whose misguided attempts to get close to one person go terribly awry.

Love-loved this book.