Jason Taylor is the smart, funny, and especially endearing
first-person narrator of this gem, which takes place in a small English town in
the 1980s. Jason has a stammer, which is
different from a stutter, according to Jason, and it plagues his thirteen-year-old
life almost as much as the bullies at school.
And if these problems weren’t torture enough, his parents’ marriage is
on the rocks, and his sister is leaving for college. (The prospect of a broken home is never
really funny, but Jason’s mom hilariously punishes his father for his
infidelity with an expensive project that backfires.) Jason’s numerous adventures fill the pages of
this novel, the most telling of which, I think, is when he finds the lost
wallet of his primary nemesis. Another
good one is his race through a backyard gauntlet which he has to negotiate in
order to join a vaunted school gang, and this obstacle course seems to be a
metaphor for the many pitfalls of adolescence which he has to weave his way
through on a daily basis. Jason strives
for acceptance into a peer group that is obviously not worthy of him, but,
along the way, he learns some valuable life lessons about love, death, bigotry,
and honesty—to name a few. We also
discover late in the novel that the burden of guilt weighs him down, even
though he really bears no responsibility for the tragedy in question. In other words, he holds himself to too high
a standard at times, and he’s a sensitive kid, writing poetry under a pseudonym
in order to avoid ridicule. My only
complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that Jason’s narration is full of
contractions, even double contractions, such as “shouldn’t’ve,” that are
difficult to read. I think the author
intends for these contractions to lend authenticity to Jason’s voice, but that
authenticity would be easier to listen to than to read, and I think Jason would
be just as authentic on the page without this distraction.