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Yeah, I'm just not feeling
this one. I mean, I get it and all, but it feels too much like one
of the twelve Tupac albums that his mother has put out since his death.
Why not publish the eighth grade English paper he wrote on Steinbeck's
The Pearl while you're at it? Okay, that's a bit of a stretch,
but this thing really wasn't supposed to see the light of day, and
here it is available for mass consumption. I understand Toole's mother
was trying to do right by her son after his suicide, but this is just
a case of piggybacking on a serendipitous miracle [his first book,
Confederacy of Dunces]. The book is by no means terrible,
but it feels too much like Toole trying to pander to a genre. Of course,
he was a teen when he wrote this, so imitating a style is excusable,
but there are other books that do it better. The one thing that you
can say about the thing is that, unlike a bunch of books I¨ve read
lately, this maintains its voice throughout and, unlike a more recent
imitator like Vernon God Little, actually sounds like a child
talking in the voice of a child, and not an adult's version of what
a kid should sound like. I honestly avoided reading this book for
a while for fear that it would ruin my view of Toole (and didn't feel
like paying fourteen bucks for such a low page count), but once my
dad handed it off to me, I realized that I was just being stupid about
the whole thing. While I obviously haven't had wonderful things to
say about it, the story is certainly impressive when put in the context
of its sixteen year-old author--only it could have been much more
powerful if he had an editor to tone down the occasional moral grandstanding
and help pick up the pace of the plodding narrative. Ultimately, the
thing will just leave you sad and sorry for what you know must be
going through the teenage mind of a boy who eventually ended his life
by his own hand.
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