Jesus Christ man get it together

The characters weren't relatable. I didn't find myself to like ANY of the characters in the book. I kept reading, assuming that something more was going to happen, but it never did.

Ok - was NOT expecting to be profoundly moved by this book. But I was. Hawke seemed like he was staring straight into the most hidden parts of my consciousness. The way he described things like attraction, love, dysfunction, ect were just absolutely disarming to me.

It seems like we've all come up with euphemisms for how we are actually thinking about things like attraction and love, and Hawke takes those mechanisms and tears them down, using language that you've never eve let your mind use to describe how you were really feeling.

I was in a funk for about a week after reading this book. I'm pretty sure this is MY coming of age novel. Catcher in the Rye did nothing for me, really. But i think what this book did to me is what Salinger did to everyone else I know.

I admire Ethan Hawke, he is such a fantastic author/actor. ''The Hottest State'' is a raw vision of a 21 year old who feels lonely, doesn't the path he has to follow in life and this girl Sarah changes his life. However, Hawke shows us how difficult love is and life itself reflected on a young boy who didn't know his father well and had a life full of difficulties.

I loved it.

I found this novel disturbing and brilliant. William, the main character and narrator of the story, is an actor who’s as narcissistic as he is ridden by self-doubt. He was absolutely unbearable and it’s clear from the beginning why Sarah, the woman he falls in love with, feels confined by him the minute they start going out.
Hawkes depiction of a relationship getting one-sided and obsessive is really well written and intense.

It was good. Very much slice of time I think many of us go through in our "youth".
He writes kinda "rough" if I can use that as an adjective.

I think Hawke needs to stick to acting.

Ho-hum. Another young man with boiling testosterone, who beds anyone in sight--of course, the one he falls for is a little "different." Yeah, right. I would dump him, too.

Dieses Buch habe ich schon einmal gelesen, vor langer, langer Zeit. Jetzt habe ich es in einem
Bücherschrank gefunden und es war wie „nach Hause kommen“, einige Sätze und Passagen hatte ich noch im Kopf.
Eine Liebesgeschichte über das erste, richtige Verliebtsein und die Tragik des Scheiterns. Aus nostalgischen Gründen habe ich jeden einzelnen Satz von Ethan Hawke genossen und bin „Hin und weg“! Ich werde definitiv weitere Werke des Schriftstellers/Schauspielers lesen!

Ironically I picked up The Hottest State because I thought to myself: "I haven't read any male authors lately. I'm looking to get a masculine perspective on something for a change of pace." So I start to read, and I realize "Oh, shit. This is Ethan Hawke. He has emotions and shit."

The main character falls messily in love with a mysterious curvy girl who has serious boundary inconsistencies. Readers are led to empathize a little tiny bit with the protagonist's love interests, but mostly we're stuck in the protagonist's potential narcissism.

I'm glad it was a quick read.

My favorite part is some poetry the boy wrote when he was seven years old:

The cowboy rides
Through desert by desert
Traveling by horses
He gets dirty
Like a rag buried in the sand
And he dies full of age
and bullets

A hat is shaped in lots of different ways
A big bump in the middle
And flat on the sides
And nothing like a jacket.

Fort Worth is the hottest state I know
My dad lives there
My grandma too
Most every grandparent
except a few

It's so cute! I want to give the boy hugs! (But the grownup not so much.)

What I like about these little known novels is that you don't actually have big standarts for them.
With well known books like Perks of Being a Wallflower people is always like "OMG this is the best novel in the worl", and those novels usually try to touch a lot of themes: love, lost, drugs, alcohol, sex, parents, friendship, blabla. And you usually have something with lots of glue.

But here we have a "male" version of crush and first time you really love and lost someone. Hard and all, but I liked that it was like a normal life. Not a big world change for everyone.

Good ending. Also, I'm pretty sure Manson Fifteen is related since the protagonist also has a birthday while on chapter fifteen.

I read this back in 1996 when it was released. Before it was a movie....
This book has stayed in my thoughts a long while.
Quality writing in my opinion.