The Way We Roll
Scott Gardner
Will lives under the bowling alley and pushes trolleys for a day-job. His life involves pumping iron at the gym so he can have a shower, and feeding off Japanese sushi. Julian eats takeaway and has a sexy girlfriend who hangs out with him in the ‘burbs when he isn’t pushing trolleys. The two boys and their worlds are distant, but their trolley-pushing pushes them together too.
The twist in this novel is that you don’t know there is a twist. I’m really not sure how long Will’s situation has been the way it is, but you get the snap-shot of when things are really changing. Will is very skittish, but cute all the same. Julian is not cute. He’s just annoying and pushy and a great friend.
This novel was laugh out loud funny. Literally. I needed to stop several times to read it out loud to my partner so that she could also appreciate the humour. That being said, the humour was of a fart / inappropriate variety, but if you can’t laugh about some of these things, you need to anyway!
I’m not sure that Julian running from the goat is a major part of the novel (as suggested by the blurb), but being a friend or family is really important. This novel moves super quickly and there’s hardly time for character development. Who cares about character development when there is a fast-acting plot?
I’d strongly recommend this novel to relutant teenage readers. In fact, I think I enjoyed it enough to give it 5 stars. It’s rare that a novel makes me laugh so hard, or need to share so much of it while I’m reading it.
Most of us want to hope that we won’t fall for a Con. Who would get into a pyramid scheme? Hell, I was almost pulled into one as a kid, but it didn’t work in Australia because we don’t have $1 notes to post. The deal was that you post $1 to each person on the list, then you add your name to the bottom of the list. Then the more people you send it to, the more you make back. Now it costs a $1 to send the damn letter, so you wouldn’t even break even!
I’m not certain what kind of audience this book is aimed for. Maybe for a tween girl? Someone who just wants to dip into a book, be inspired, then come back out. It took me maybe 5 minutes to read it, and I wouldn’t see myself buying the book myself.
I feel like it is possible that this novel had too many themes crammed into it, but instead I felt like they all balanced themselves out. It read exactly like the protagonist was thinking and feeling. Ash struck me as so confused, and yet so cute. And don’t be put off by the ‘teacher crush’ thing. It’s not a big deal, its just used as a prop for forwarding Ash’s character development.
Ah, the ending. It tidied things up nicely. Perhaps too nicely. Worlds never end like that. So it could be unexpected, except the minute a couple of people do their ‘expose’ thing, then it becomes obvious what is happening around that, and it proves to be inevitable. It was already so unpredictable, in its own way it was predictable.
All the characters feel one-dimensional, which is ironic, given that pretty much only 2D things can slip through the current crack used by Elliot and Madeline. I’m sure they could all pass through too!
This novel started so slowly and got so confusing at times that I couldn’t work out what was going on. I struggled to get into it, and found myself easily distracted. Near the end, I was finally hit with a shock of ‘wow’, but it only lasted a couple of pages.
I admit I had difficulty remembering which character was which for the majority of the novel. Not the main characters, but the side ones (haha). The abbreviations of their names tripped me up.
Elspeth goes from a lonely loner to someone who dares to have friends. Funny how losing everything seems to do that to a person. She progresses rapidly from someone only concerned about saving herself to someone who can and will help others. It’s that transformation that brought me back to this novel over and over again.
I always wanted more. It wasn’t enough for me that Stephanie’s brother was dead. I wanted the gruesome details. And it wasn’t enough that her mother wept, or that there was something interesting going on in the deal with her grandparents, that we never found out about.