About a Boy

By Nick Hornby

This is the first British book I've read since I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone back in the fourth grade. I have to say that this book beats anything J.K. Rowling could write, but I hate Harry Potter and all of his wizard friends, too. I don't know why that is, just that it is. I got bored halfway through The Chamber of Secrets and decided that the series was too boring to move on and I didn't care about any of the characters.

Not true with Hornby's fictional people. I worried so much about Marcus, the boy this novel is about. He has a very dysfunctional family, and the other central character Will has a dysfunctional pseudo-family when he gets sucked into Marcus' life. This wasn't a novel of plot, like Rowling's books, it was a coming-of-age novel about a boy who doesn't fit in at all. How he changes kept me moving to see just what kind of kid he would be by the end of the novel. If you read it, too, you'll be sucked into how everything in our childhood somehow manages to create the person we become. There was just one problem with Hornby's style. It felt as though we were spending too much time in the character's heads. It's fine to get in there every once in awhile, but entire pages of a 3rd person narrative shouldn't be in the 1st person. That and his excessive use of "OK." I'm not British, but it seems they use it for just about everything according to Hornby, and it bothered me.

4 stars.

Next (which I promise won't be as soon as this one was): The Gun Seller by House, I mean, Hugh Laurie (yes, the Hugh Laurie. Turns out he also writes novels).