Book report

So Dominic is a bit of a favourite with the school librarian, so much so, that when she decided this book was perhaps a bit too mature in content for the Elementary lending shelves, she asked me if I thought it would be okay for her to lend to him anyway. I said yes.

And then it transpired that the school nurse - who is lovely - had also read it and she really thought I should read it too. And so I have.

It is a pretty cool book, all about a boy from a very difficult background moving to a new town and a new school in 1968. Some of it is pretty harsh - his father takes him to a tattoo parlour and has Mummy's Boy tattoed on him against his wishes on his 12th birthday. That bit nearly made me cry. And then his brother comes home from Vietnam, half blind and in a wheelchair. But there are also wonderful characters - the librarian that teaches him to draw, the daughter of the man that runs the deli, some of his teachers and a local writer - but not the Principal, or the sports coach, at least to begin with.

Dominic liked the writer and the famous baseball player and the parts about the crimes going on in town which the main character's other brother is wrongly believed to have committed. So thumbs up for plot and characters from us.