It is, definitely, a compelling story - and a well-written one, too.
But yet.
These boys are supposed to be fourteen year old. Trying to recall memories of what i was like, what my friends were like when we went to school - a school roughly comparable one to the institution the boys attend, albeit in Europe - I simply do not remember us ever talking, thinking like they do. Either American boys are far more mature than we, Europeans, were at that age (though, e.g., American TV-series like "Friends" strike me as singularly childish for what, really, are supposed to be men and women in their mid-twenties....) , or the author is projecting a more adult mind-set on his protagonists.