100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith
Finn is epileptic with seizures that he can’t control. He’s actually not sure he’d want to anyway, because his seizures are beautiful experiences, even though he pees himself during them. Finn also has eyes that are different colors. But those are not the wildest things about Finn. Finn’s mother was killed in the same freak accident that left him with epilepsy, a dead horse fell from a knackery truck passing on a bridge overhead and struck them both. Perhaps even wilder though is Finn’s best friend Cade, who is almost certainly insane but also staggeringly funny. Finn has a theory about his life. His father wrote a book that has a character with many of the same characteristics as Finn who happened to be a murdering alien. Perhaps Finn is caught in that book, or maybe the entire world is just a knackery truck. Then Julia enters Finn’s life and he is suddenly shown that there is much more to life or the knackery than he had ever realized.
Smith has written several acclaimed novels and this one is by far my favorite. He writes with a solid honesty, with teen characters who swear, who have sex, who talk about sex, who love and lust. The book is filled with humor, even the scene where Finn and Cade are accidental heroes is filled with slapstick moments mixed with profound courage. That is the way this book plays, it is humorous but also exceptionally though provoking.
Finn is a deeply flawed character who sees the world in a unique and strange way. He measures time in terms of distance, something that is unsettling at first but then becomes almost a natural way to view time by the end of the book. There is also something wonderfully darkly humorous about a character in a book worrying that he is a character in another book. The novel has layers upon layers and invites readers to look deeply into the story and to find their own way through the knackery of life.
A great teen novel, one of the best of the year, get this into the hands of teens who will enjoy the humor, understand the depth and not be offended by the strong language. Appropriate for ages 14-17.
Reviewed from copy received from Simon & Schuster.
Waking Brain Cells 