Tenderness

I recently read the novel Tenderness by Robert Cormier. This book set a very dark and dreary tone and maintained it well throughout the book. This was quite the contrast from the John Green book that we read for my Young Adult Literature class because that was written rather cheery and sarcastically joyful. The main character in this book is really two people: Eric Poole an 18 year old kid who is just now getting out of a juvenile detention center that he has been in for the last three or so years for killing his mother and his step father. The second main character is Lori, she is a fifteen year old girl who has a weird habit of becoming easily fixated with people and Eric is her most recent victim of fixation. The book centers around these two and their similarly desolate and opressed lives and how they come together and arguably fall in love with one another.
The plot for this book is very impressive and it is a very plot driven book which I typically do not like. However, Cormier has a way of making the plot interesting by switching the focus of characters back and forth between who is talking at the time. Lori is a chronically notorious run away and one day when she ran away she saw Eric and a girl walking down some train tracks. She assumes the girl is Eric's girlfriend, however, at the time she did not know who Eric was because he was not in the public eye for being a murderer. She later sees Eric alone (she later comes to find out that he killed her in the woods) and he is very nice to her. He almost assumes a fatherly role towards her when a gang of bikers approach and begin to harass her. Three years later when Eric is released from the "facility" she sees him on the television and is fixated on him again. Eric is staying with his aunt at the time and decides to go for a drive only to find out that Lori snuck into his van. He is worried and decides that he needs to kill her because they talk and he finds out that she was a witness to him pre-murder years ago for a crime for which he was not yet convicted and probably never would be as long as she kept quiet. Eric and her have a nice evening together going shopping, eating dinner and just talking. Later in the hotel room he tries to snuff her with a pillow. He decides against it and she confesses her love to him. The next day Eric is going to meet a girl that he met in jail and finds out via. Lori that it is a scam set up by the tenacious detective. Lori and Eric go canoeing together later and Lori hits her head and drowns. Naturally the detective assumes that he murdered her and he goes back to jail where he finally gets in touch with his human emotion by crying.
I think this book is not so great of a learning tool for young adults but that does not take away from the fact that it is still a great and very entertaining book. The themes I felt were too obvioius but weakly displayed. Clearly due to the title both Eric and Lori were seeking tenderness which they finally found together. I feel like desperation and solitude were some key themes in this book. Overall this book was a great plot centered book, not great literature by any means but I am very glad I read it and would like to read more of Robert Cormier's works.