The Pain, My Mother, Sir Tiffy, Cyber Boy & Me
Michael Gerard Bauer
Maggie has three realistic goals for the year. Unfortunately, her past seems to be halting any sort of progression – she’s going to need to step outside what she thinks, and think about other people too.
This novel takes both its name and its conversational writing style In the ‘tradition’ of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Now, if you’ll remember my review, I didn’t particularly like that novel, I preferred The Haters. Instead of sex and penis jokes, this novel is filled with puns. If you love puns, you might love the way the novel is written. For me, I could have done with less humour and more substance.
Although the different chapters purport to reveal and hide things in equal measure to how Maggie’s life goes positive to negative, I found the progression of the novel slow and the storyline typical. There are better novels out there that will give teenage readers more to bite into.
I have faith from other reviews that this author’s other offerings are better – maybe I will pick up The Running Man in my spare time if it crosses my path. I’m not going to seek it out though, enough teenage fiction for me.
No outlasting love for me here. Maggie is a self-absorbed brat that although her character develops throughout the novel, for me she never became more likeable. For that, I’m going to give it 3 stars. The main reason I read it was so that I could leave it for my niece to read and I didn’t have to bring it home with me! BCID – 352–14075986.
If this novel had been billed as an expose of what it looks like when a family is ripped apart by a disappearance, then maybe I could have gotten into it. Even then, it was too caught up in what Sam felt for anything else to really come through. I never want to be in that position.
As long as you can get past the extreme amounts of explicit swearing in the prologue and first chapter, you’ll be golden for reading this novel. If that sort of thing bothers you, I advise skipping straight ahead. I put the book down and tried to take a nap instead of keeping reading at that point. Anyway, I persevered and it got better from there.
This is the novel of when parenting isn’t smooth sailing. Or perhaps, just parenting in general. It takes a look at how men and women somehow change in the months following their child’s birth, and yet hopefully stay the same.
I couldn’t work out what the main part of this novel was. Finding someone? Yes, ok. Saving a magazine? Yes, ok. Exposing some sort of crime? Yes, ok. Character development? Nope. Boring stuff about jobs that I didn’t care about? Oh, yes. None of the action happened in the first half. I wanted to love it, I really did.
This book was such a disappointment. All the exciting things promised in the blurb turned out to be completely predictable. The grand secret? Meh. I wasn’t that convinced that her dad had done anything wrong. It’s hard to cope with children, of any kind!
This book was actually enjoyable. I was hesitant. As I say though, Reed is from the people angle. After his son’s accident, he’s one of the people who have pushed forward from the ground up to make a difference in politics to change ordinary people’s lives. As a geneticist, this gets into all sorts of ethical ideas and messes, some of which are discussed here.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this novel. I wanted something fantasy because I was sick of teenage drama. No fear here – a scrap of ‘isn’t she pretty’, but otherwise fantasy running wild. Very satisfying and light to read.
Whiplash! The ending took me completely by surprise. Phew! My head may have literally flipped backwards. I couldn’t believe it. I just had to keep reading, but in fact, it was in a course of a couple of pages that the whole thing ended up on its head.