The best way for me to describe this novel is as a mix between a warm hug and a slap in the face, because it touches difficult themes with a softness that I have found rarely in my experience as a reader. The end of this book totally destroyed me emotionally and I wasn't ready to sob after reading the last page. The fact that the story was narrated by the main character who was imagining to tell his mother (who left him when he was 18) his current life, made everything more touching and sometimes hard to read, due to the fact that the protagonist views the world with the eyes of a "mentally delayed" men who thinks little of himself and thinks that he could earn his mother's love if only he were more intelligent. I also appreciated the talk around accepting help and admitting the need of it without shame. I underlined many sentences, both of quotes that touched me personally and ones that simply were universally true.