I do feel that this book might appeal to younger reader. Unfortunately it wasn’t for me. The story is about a University student Nate who is a drug dealer and user set in 1990, who is also trying to solve mystery of his dead friend and missing supplier. I didn’t like the feeling being inside Nate head. For most of the novel he was stoned, numb and his behaviour was impulsive. I didn’t feel I got to know who Nate really was nor did I sympathize or connect.

Here's why I thought I'd like it: it promised a dark, compelling read set in a university.

Here's why I didn't like it: Too dark. It was too much. If it had only focused on drug trafficking and drug use, it would've been fine but a nobody trying to solve a murder and unnecessary of explicit scenes made it uninteresting for me. I didn't care about Nate or any of these characters, because there was no development of their personalities so that the reader could gauge their deeper worries or concerns.

Yeah, I thought this was for me but I guess not.

2.5 stars

This is not going to be an easy review to write, books you aren't fully satisfied with never are. Some elements were intriguing, intriguing enough for me to continue reading even though part of me wanted to DNF this book about a week ago.

It's just hard to know how I feel because the book was all over the place, probably because the main protagonist was stoned all the time), but the jumps and the unravelling just didn't feel fully cohesive, and the ending was very abrupt.

Very enjoyable and well written story of crime in small town Australia. Good characters, realistic dialogue and an interesting plot.

Nate is a college student and pot dealer living in a trailer park outside of Gatton, Queensland in 1994. Winter has left Gatton and September’s spring has dried up Nate’s pot supply causing him several problems in Iain Ryan’s The Student (Echo Press). First and foremost, Nate pays his rent with weed, so no weed no trailer. And then his friend and connection Jesse has disappeared. Eviction looms and it’s only Wednesday.

A few more pages into The Student, two bikers from the Doomriders visit Nate looking for Jesse and/or $45,000. Dennis and Hatch scare the shit out of Nate while explaining to him that he is now responsible for the money and they’ll be back to collect in a few days. It’s still only Wednesday.

Told in the first person, The Student takes place over a frantic week as Nate searches for Jesse and the money while all the time dodging customers who are unrelenting in their want of weed and the two bikers intent on getting their pound of flesh or money — they don’t seem to care. At times, Ryan has Nate slip into a stream-of-consciousness style that only increases the tension. Nate’s journey introduces us to a cast of strange characters, weird in that way that twenty-something-year-olds are as they try to discover what kind of adults they’ll be, but calling Ryan’s The Student a coming of age novel is like saying The Silence of the Lambs is about a dressmaker.

The Student makes this the fourth book I’ve read of Iain Ryan’s since November 2016. In crime fiction terms, The Student is a vanished person thriller, but that would be like categorizing Ryan’s Tunnel Island series as police procedurals. Hint, they’re not. Ryan infuses a deep dose of noir into his books, twisting the standard genres into something deviant and dark. Like Ryan’s other books, The Student is a great read filled with plenty of weirdness, violence, drugs, sex, and other sins.

I didn't particularly care for this book. The writing style didn't suit what I'm used to, and the heavy focus on stoners wasn't appealing to me.

This was a unique book in that I didn't like any of the characters but the writing was done well enough that I kept going just to see what happens.

The subject matter is not for the faint of heart, it is graphic and explicit which was probably the driving force behind my continuing reading even when everything else was a fail.

This book focuses on Nate, the mystery behind the murder of a girl named Maya, and some other stuff I didn't particularly care for.

I initially got a copy from NetGalley because the synopsis sounded interesting. I love mysteries. I, however, did not enjoy this as much as I hoped I would. I didn't have any interest in the characters. The only thing I cared about enough to finish the story was the mystery aspect. Even so, I kind of sloughed through it. It was hard to get into and hard to finish. It does get three stars for the mystery though.

This book ended up not being for me. The main character, Nate, gets mixed up in trying to locate a large stack of cash to appease some drug dealers that his buddy has gotten involved in. As he tries to chase down this money, he learns that his friend was involved in a lot more trouble than he realized.

This book just didn't grab me. From the beginning, none of the characters appealed to me and none of them seemed to do much developing throughout the story. I also didn't feel particularly pulled into the story line. By the end of the book, I was struggling to get all the way through it.

The Student is a dark and gritty thriller. Yet, as uncomfortable as some of the scenes were, I could not put it down. The book took the reader on a fast-paced downward spiral into a dark world of drugs and sex. It's a story in which all moral compasses point down, and nothing is good or right.
I was rooting for the main character for the first part of the book, but by the end, I knew nothing good would happen to him. He was too damaged and in too dire of straights to ever rebound. About halfway through the book, I mourned the loss of his innocence, but after that, I kind of gave up.
I can't say that I enjoyed The Student - it was too bleak for me - but it was well written.

This is book is about Nate’s drug dealing and the downward spiral of his life. Nate is an almost absent student in Queensland who deals in weed and sends the money back home to his parents so they can keep a roof over their heads. One night bikies knock him around in their search for his friend Jesse. They are chasing debts owed to them and deliver an ultimatum to find Jesse or else!
Initially I thought this book was aimed at the teenage market but soon changed my thinking the further I read.
This story could be described as unusual, sad, funny, stark, touching, occasionally leaving me thinking of the futility of his life and a fantastic read. This book has been compared to the TV series Breaking Bad but I felt it had much more substance. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Unfortunately, this novel wasn't for me. Maybe it was the ARC I received, but the story didn't seem to flow very well. There were parts where the timeline of the novel changed and the transition was not marked clearly, so I had to go back and reread it to make sense of what was happening. While it was interesting to get an indepth look into the drug world, it was just so miserable-sounding that I didn't really want to continue reading. I had no connection or feelings for any of the characters, and that was perhaps my biggest disappointment because it influenced my ability to care about the story itself. Maybe it's just me, because there are quite a few positive reviews on Goodreads but this novel just didn't do it for me. I would recommend this to anyone who likes books that can be classified as noir.

Wow, well this really wasn't what I was expecting. I thought this was going to be a little mysterious but it wasn't in the slightest. It was just hardcore, gritty Australian crime. 

This one is seriously dark and graphic. I'm not really into the gritty sex, gritty crime kind of books, so a lot of this one wasn't really my cup of tea. We follow around a student drug dealer whose friend, and supplier, has gone missing. What ensues is a long journey of some seriously gruesome discoveries. While, of course, this book has a plot, it's one of those books that also feels like it has no plot. It concludes itself, but it doesn't really finish.

I enjoyed the way it was written. The snappy sentences and the minimal descriptions, it felt right for this book. It definitely wasn't the best written book in the world, but it did what it needed to do and it did it quite well.

As for characters, there's no one to like in this book and I think that's intentional. I mean, don't me wrong, I did empathise with Nate in some parts but he wasn't a likeable guy.

In the end, this one just kind of depressed me and was reminiscent of Sarah by JT LeRoy in it's brutal darkness. I think maybe the synopsis needs to be changed because it definitely sounds like a completely different novel to the one I just finished.

Thanks to Netgalley & Bonnier Publishing Australia for giving me the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review.

This book was not normally one that I would have picked up but I'm glad I read it because I don't think I've read any other noir, dark, gritty novels before. Nate, the main character is a college student/drug dealer and his story is full of twists and turns that I did not expect but definitely made it interesting. Too raw and also a little too much graphic violence for me but the plot was believable and good, somewhat somber and dark, but definitely tied up at the end. I actually liked the book more towards the end. Good writing and fast-paced which also made it better than I had expected because this is not a normal genre for me.

I really thought I liked noir. But this novel is noir in its deepest, darkest element. College student, Nate spends the first 30% of the book searching for his friend and supplier, Jesse who has suddenly disappeared. Looking everywhere he can think of, he spends most of the time getting stoned and drunk, going to class only when he thinks someone there might know of Jesse's whereabouts. Once he finds answers, he realizes they are not the ones he wanted and we get a look at some explicit porn, violence, and more drug-dealing, wasted good/bad guys. Certainly the author is talented as the prose is stark and haunting; maybe just not a good fit for me as it was so depressing and I was glad I didn't know these people in college. If you love noir, this is the novel for you but be prepared for some realistically dark and somber scenes.

I read in one day. This has a great, crisp writing style. Very fast pace, which worked well for this novel. Will definitely lookout for more from author in the future!

Mysterious, fast-paced, easy read. Pulled me in from the first sentence; not putting it down until the end.

A cute (well not really that cute) story that read like a episodic autobiography.

The writing felt real and it was fast paced. I liked and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The thing that got me confused were those "two" points of view we could find in each chapter. I didn't know if they were different people, past and present or what... but at the end everything got cleared out.

This was definitely not what I was expecting. I expected some kind of mystery, but instead we followed a drug dealer around. Not an easy life, but I guess you know what you signed up for right? I would categorize this as a novella or short story where we follow a 'not so bad' drug dealer who needs to make things right. There are some bumps along the way where we get to see the darker side of this world. I categorized this as a short story because it could have been more and I would have asked more of a novel.

I didn't feel an attachment to any of the characters displayed here, didn't find a connection but didn't hate our main protagonist either. Although without any cleat knowledge of this type of business, everything described here felt completely real and non fictional, for some reason.

The fact is that I got an image of this Australian town that I didn't like, at all. I know the plot centered in a drug user crowd but everyone here seemed to be an user, which doesn't sound realistic at all. Still, I enjoyed this little story.