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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