Cal is a very strange book, and I honestly can't quite tell what parts of it I enjoyed. The moral wound up a little too "violence is never the answer" for me (when has non violence against a violent state ever changed that violence?), but that's more personal taste than anything else - the author did a good job of making his point. What I found more questionable was the treatment of the love interest. A great deal of the casual sexism makes sense for the POV character (18, male, mentally troubled, Troubles era Catholic), but her internality confused me. Why is this adult widow so deeply and immediately in love with the teenager who's been stalking her? I'd buy it as him projecting if we didn't hear her say it, unprompted, several times. It felt like I was meant to see this beautiful love story as making the tragedy worse, but. When characters start breasting boobily it's really hard to keep treating them all as *people* so much as products of a writer being ridiculous.