Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga

Once again, I find a book that I didn't expect to enjoy, but it turns out I did. This isn't my favorite book by a long shot. It is too uncomfortable for that. But it does ring very true and you can't help liking a book that is this real.

The idea is that Fanboy is a geek and a comic book fan. Skinny and short and smart don't make for an especially good combination in his megaschool. His one saving grace is his friend Cal, a black kid, who overlaps Fanboy's world by being smart and liking comics, but who also belongs to the cool jock crowd. Fanboy's parents are divorced and he lives with his very pregnant mother and step-father, but he visits his increasingly distant father once a month.

Not wanting to participate actively in sadistic high school dodgeball, Fanboy purposely gets eliminated, only to be pounded on repeatedly by another student, while the teachers seemingly purposely aren't watching. But Goth Girl is watching and is intrigued. Goth Girl is direct, mouthy, and fearless - at least outwardly. Her odd friendship with Fanboy gradually brings him out of his self-imposed isolation. But it isn't all goodness and light either. As I said at the top, this is a very realistic sounding book.

In many ways, Fanboy is relatively naive. He likes looking at girls, but considers himself too ugly to ever get involved with a girl. He has his hopes pinned on college and getting away. He thinks most everyone else has it better than he does - and in some ways, he is right. But he has small epiphanies along the way that teach him that the rest of the people in his world aren't doing as well as he imagines either.

And I was glad that he didn't have to have sex with anyone to prove that he was normal. This seems to be the ending of a lot of the teen angst books nowadays, but this one didn't need that - his fantasies were enough. :-)

For older students.

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