The Spectacular Now (by Tim Tharp)

High school senior Sutter Keely is never without a drink -- in a go-cup, hip-flask, or car-trunk-turned-ice-chest -- and he is always slightly buzzed, sometimes falling-down drunk. Sutter is a happy drunk, the life of the party. He says that he is "one hundred percent serious about not being serious," and can't understand why his classmates seem so interested in planning ahead. When he meets nerdy Aimee, who supports her mother's gambling with her paper route, Sutter decides he is just what Aimee needs. But his friends don't seem to agree.

This book is different than most YA stories about addiction: Sutter does not learn the Big Lesson, and he doesn't see the error of his ways or join AA. By the end he is still an alcoholic. But careful readers will be able to deduce that his story is a tragedy: everyone he loves is moving on, while he has still not graduated from high school, has lost his job -- and even his drinking is not always purely pleasurable the way it once was.

Not all the plotting is perfect: Some readers may find the scene where Sutter finally finds his father a bit of a letdown. But readers will find it easy to root for Sutter, who has some real kindness locked inside -- as well as some deep pain -- and find it difficult to leave him drunk and alone outside of a sad dive bar, disappearing "little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now."