Adam grabbed this one at the library this weekend because it was on the young-adult New Arrivals shelf, and he remembered that his mother, who teaches children's literature at a state college, had recommended it. He got first dibs on reading it, so I waited around most of the weekend while he read and read and laughed and laughed and laughed. I don't usually hear him laughing out loud so often at a book.
It is very funny, and the main character is so like him; it's no wonder my boyfriend liked it. I liked it too -- perhaps a little less than he did, but it's not the book's fault. It's just that I've read quite a few books about child prodigies, and quite a few books with funny, acerbic footnotes, and after a while they start to get a little blurred together. Which is a function of my weird tastes -- it's not exactly an old, tired genre.
I also didn't love the way Green worked mathematics into the book. It's such a valiant, passionate attempt to show how cool Real Math and Theorems and Science can be, how much fun it is to figure out how to generalize and explain things -- but somehow it didn't quite work for me. Since I'm a mathematician, that's hard for me to say! I hope, actually, that that's the problem, and that this subplot will work just fine for readers just a little less picky than I am.
So much complaining! These are small flaws in an intelligent, witty, unnervingly lifelike, and sometimes laugh-out-loud-funny novel. Do read it!
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