This review was originally published on my other blog in 2007.
Coming on the heels of reading two British school stories, reading
this modern Canadian story is rather a shock. The narrator of this
book. a thirteen year old boy, is an amazingly self-centered, obnoxious,
clueless kid. The fact that, eventually, he reluctantly and more
through accident than planning begins to have a conscience is
gratifying, if not entirely convincing.
A brief
outline of this book: boy and his mother and father move to take over
management of a failing store owned by mother's mother. Obnoxious boy
gets into trouble for theft and insensitivity to others and is forced by
parents to volunteer at a local soup kitchen. Boy tries to get in good
with both sides - the business side and the soup kitchen side, not out
of conviction one way or the other, but out of sheer superficiality of
who happens to have food, porn, or amusement available for him.
Eventually, he has to take a stand and comes out in favor of the soup
kitchen, but you are still left wondering if he really understands that
he isn't the center of the universe.
The book is funny
and the boy does have some good lines, but it is still disconcerting to
me. Our modern "hero" is really a self-centered jerk. He does manage
to gain a little bit of insight into how poor people live, but I could
easily see that evaporating when something else becomes more interesting
or important to his Royal Adolescence.
I don't
really want goody-two-shoes modern heroes, but a little bit more
understanding and less jerkiness would have been welcome. At least his
two friends are a bit less callous. Maybe next time the story will be
about them.
No comments:
Post a Comment