So I'm sort of on this kick of teen guy fiction right now. It's all John Green's fault. I'm having a hard time waiting for Paper Towns to come out so over the weekend I re-read Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines, which then led me to pick up Hero Type, and now I've just finished Losers. While not quite as literary as a Green novel or as socially forward thinking as Hero Type, Losers won me over with its almost cool main character and crisp, descriptive phrases.
Jupiter Glazer is fourteen, a Russian immigrant, a high school freshman, almost friendless, and poor. His accent and crazy name make him a target when all he'd really like to do is walk down the halls of his Philly high school with anonymity. He is expected to come home each day to work in the elevator parts factory where he also lives with his well-meaning, clueless parents. Jupiter would love to find a place to hide for the next four years, but then a brief conversation with a waitress gives him an idea. What if he could lose his accent? He spends his first high school weekend doing nothing but listening to all sorts of American music. By Monday his accent is gone, and with the luck of meeting a few key people and being in the right place at the right time, Jupiter finds himself on the fringe of the cool kid crowd, and not totally hated by the rest of the student body within a month of entering North Shore High.
While Losers may not have the most original plot, Roth certainly knows how to turn a phrase and draw in his audience. Take his description of the diner where he meets the waitress:
"The Country Club was the most revered and upscale of all the dirty, deep-fried, oil-hanging-in-the-air and waitresses-who-call-you-"hon" places you can imagine. They even had a dress code there. It ran along the lines of "No Shirt, No Service, " but it was still a dress code."
This paragraph totally had me craving a visit to Waffle House for one of their totally greasy but still fluffy light omelettes and an order of butter drenched grits. I'm not sure an original plot is all that necessary when you can make a reader's mouth water. As the volumes of YA novels published each year continue to grow, it's going to be less and less about what happens, and more about how you say it, and I think Matthue Roth knows how to say it.
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