Job Lot Reads 3: Jack Tumor

Title: Jack Tumor
Publisher: FSG
Author: Anthony McGowan
Category: Young Adult Fiction

Photo from Macmillan.com

Hector is being bullied. At his school, it's nothing out of the ordinary, but it is when you're being bullied by your talking, know-it-all brain tumor that tells you that you're living your life incorrectly. Now, having to live with a talking tumor that calls itself Jack, Hector has two lives that he needs to find a balance for: the life he lives, and the one that Jack wants him to live.

This novel is uproariously funny, in that British sort of way. (No surprise there, it's a book from England!) The humor in here is still enjoyable by those of us in the States, even if you're not familiar with some of the English references in it, because of the writing style and the "realness" if the characters (especially Hector.) It took me about seven hours total to read this book, and I loved every page of it. This was another win for the Job Lot as far as books go.

Rating: 9/10

Job Lot Reads 2: Holdup

Title: Holdup
Author: Terri Fields
Publisher: FSG/Square Fish
Category: Young Adult Fiction

Photo from Macmillan.com

This book is interesting. Instead of starting with a summary, like I usually would, I'm going to just go ahead and say it: This is one of those unique, multi-narrator-telling-the-same-event kinds of stories that are quite hard to pull off well.

Terri Fields pulls this off well.

Even saying that, though, I didn't like this book. The story was fluid and had an amazingly steady pace; every narrator had their own unique, defined voice (I never once got confused with a who's who moment); and transitioning between narrators never seemed awkward or clunky. So even knowing and realizing that the book was well-written, flowed amazingly well, and had a compelling storyline, why didn't I like it?

Perhaps it was the same thing that made this book so interesting to me in the first place: the multi-narrator format of it. There's something both compelling and annoying about books with many perspectives. On one hand, they let every major character tell their own take on the things happening, their opinions of other characters, and their outlook on the situation on the whole. On the other hand, you have the same exact thing.

In the end, Holdup is an amazingly well-written novel that tells the story from nine points of view about a burger-joint holdup. Its best feature is also what irks me most about it, even though it's done incredibly well. I suppose that I just don't like the multiple narrator writing style. If you're looking for an interesting read, though, Holdup might definitely be for you.

Rating: 6-7/10

Job Lot Reads 1: Full Service

Title: Full Service

Photo from Macmillan.com

Author: Will Weaver

Publisher: FSG

Category: Young Adult fiction

It's the summer of 1965, and Paul Sutton is getting his first full-time job off of the family farm. Convinced that it would be good for him, his mother takes him around their small town of Hawk Bend, Minnesota looking for a job before he lands a job pumping gas at the local Shell station. For the next two hundred pages, Will learns the secrets of his small town, befriends the local regulars, and makes a few important decisions about where he's headed in life while trying to stay true to his roots.

This book had me pretty wrapped up in it from about the second chapter onward. I was pretty interested in it from the very beginning, but it wasn't until Paul started actually started interacting with the other characters around him that it caught my interest. Will Weaver's writing style is realistic and paints a vivid picture of what's going on in the small town of Hawk Bend, and I found myself really looking forward to picking it back up when I had to put it down for whatever reason. The characters were realistic (which is important to me, both as a writer myself and as a reader,) and the ending didn't leave me hanging or feeling like something was missing.


Final score: 8/10

Quite the score



Ocean State Job Lot has a bunch of young adult books on sale right now, and it's quite a score on my part. At $1.50 apiece for hardcovers, I've been able to snap up a good collection of interesting, offbeat YA books for about eighteen bucks total. I'll write about them as I read them. If you're looking for a quick read (none of the books I've found so far have been more than 400 pages long - the average seems to be about 200 pages, in fact) then these are a great bet.  

All of the books are closeouts of the The Macmillan Children's Publishing Group family: FSG, Feiwel and Friends, First Second, Holt Young Readers, Roaring Brook, and Square Fish.

External Links:

Macmillan Teen Books - from which all other imprints' websites can be reached.