Review: Everything That Kills Me by Barbara Elsborg

Two boys. One deadly secret. A love worth risking everything for.

Rescued from a raging inferno as a young child, Jack is homeschooled in more than English and maths. His saviour is training him to be an assassin. But when Jack is compelled to attend an ordinary school, in an ordinary English town, his carefully controlled life unravels.

Zeph, brilliant, passionate and determined, has his eyes set on Cambridge and a future in intelligence. He has no time for distractions, at least, not until Jack turns up at his school. He’s everything Zeph has secretly longed for but he has no idea his life will never be the same again.

As boys turn into men, the cost of their connection becomes clear. Jack’s secrets are dangerous, and each time he sees Zeph, the more the two of them are at risk. Jack knows he should walk away and not look back. Is a happy-ever-after possible when his life is full of secrets and lies, disappearances and deception?

But some things are meant to be.

Warning (from the book blurb)
Violence – this is about an assassin after all!
None of the following are major themes but occur in the cruelty to a child, bullying, homophobic and transphobic remarks, cancer, brief mention of eating disorder, brief mention of suicide, gambling, death of parents.

I GOT THE BOOK ON KU.

Dear Barbara Elsborg,

This story was a monthly read for our book discussion group. I thought it was technically well written and I liked seeing the main characters interacting on pages, but I had issues with story execution and character development.

SPOILERS – THERE WERE MANY, BEWARE.

The blurb gives us a decent set up, but as I said I am going to discuss more spoilers than what were in the blurb.

So the man saves Jack from abusive parents and decides that there can be no other profession for a six year old than assassin? Sort of teach the young generation to carry on our legacy? Okay, then. To be clear at the end we learn that man was a relation of Jack, so him giving Jack the only profession he knew sorta made a little bit more sense to me than in the beginning, but really truly not much more.

The funniest part to me about the whole assassin business as described in this book was that as Jack follows Thomas (the man who saved him) in his footsteps and starts killing people at sixteen, we learn that Thomas only accepts jobs to kill bad guys. As much as the whole world of assassin business is hidden from me, I am having trouble believing that this is ever a possibility. Of course, of course I can easily imagine why the author chose to portray both Thomas and Jack that way – we are in the world of romance and in the eyes of at least some readers the romantic lead may be tarnished if he is engaged in the indiscriminate killing by hire.

But then two possibilities come to mind – to write a romance for real grey characters (not with imaginary grey morality) or to not use an assassin as a romantic lead at all? To be clear – this is not me telling author what to write or what not to write, it is me saying that an assassin only killing bad guys is an eye roll storyline for this reader.

As I said before I liked Jack and Zeph together, I thought they had tons of chemistry, but did I buy their actions, especially Zeph’s? Not really.

Do you know for example what you do when one of your relatives pushes you to the train rail and you could die but just got hurt really badly?

Nothing! You do absolutely nothing except telling them to get help and promise not to tell anyone in exchange. This would have made a little more sense if Zeph had no where to go from his house, but he does! That’s the whole thing that he goes to live with people who love him and support him right after the unfortunate “almost died” event took place. And you just tell your unstable step-sister to get help instead of reporting her? She needed help all right, not just talking to a shrink, but a couple of years in the locked up facility in my opinion.

So many issues were dropped on these boys’/ young men’s heads and in my opinion a lot of them were not dealt with in any depth. Zeph had bone cancer (I think it was a bone cancer based on the description), then it comes back when he is a college student. I did not have time to blink and it was all done and gone (treatment, etc). I usually hate manufactured angst in stories, but one would think that if the young person has to fight another round of a potentially deadly disease, him thinking and worrying about it a little bit at least would make sense?

Jack’s parents were horrible as we learn in the beginning and we learn a little more about his mom at the end, but if this was an attempt to humanize her for me it did not really work. I know Jack was six when Thomas saves him, but he seemed to be strangely unaffected by his early childhood. In my experience at least kids form the core of their personalities by the time they are five or six.

Zeph’s father is terrible, Zeph’s stepmother seemed to be less terrible, but also confusing to me as a character.

I sort of understand Jack wanting to protect Zeph from being involved with an assassin, but a) he never leaves completely and b) Zeph’s willingness to jump into bed with him pronto was ridiculous. No, I do not mean that there is any issue with young men wanting to jump into bed quickly with the subject of their attraction, not at all. What I mean is that Zeph is hurt every single time when Jack leaves and when he is coming back – everything is forgiven and forgotten. Sigh.

Zeph is presumably dreaming about a career with MI5 since he was very young, he is very smart and all that. Do you know what you do when you finally work for MI5 and got what you dreamed about and your love interest and Thomas are in your view? You do all kind of stupid things at work and divulge all the secrets to them and make sure MI5 does not know who they are while they are on another assassin mission. Why? Because true love.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Grade: C- (because hot and only because of that otherwise I would happily give the last quarter of this book an F because Zeph and his shenanigans at work, made me so mad)

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