However, I cannot deny that the writing is instantly engaging. The book is comprised of a "dear diary" or one-sided "pen pal" format, which I think is very appealing to young adults and their ever-shortening attention spans.
Okay, who am I kidding? Us older kids like it too!
This format makes the story very digestible (it's like "chunking" for novels instead of lesson plans), and while the entries are pretty short and sweet, they're also concentrated when it comes to content, as well as frequently pretty hilarious.
The protagonist, "Charlie," appears to be an exceptionally intelligent kid, making impressively candid and often spot-on observances of the world around him. But he's still a kid, and the lens through which he perceives his reality is still refreshingly untainted - so far, anyways.
The writing style reflects his youth and his maturing thought processes through short, stillted sentences and a rambling, run-on flow. It personally distracts and annoys me, but then I think of the 8th graders from my spring practicum and realize it is exactly the same as their sentence structures for their research papers. Which only reinforces my thoughts that this novel would definitely belong on my classroom library bookshelf.
It's still too early to tell if I would deem it worthy of further incorporation into my teaching, but the writing style and voice of the protagonist alone reflect the thinking and writing patterns of adolescents. Not to mention the topics, ranging from family dynamics to hating high school to being bullied to teenage suicide. And that's all just in the first 50 pages! It's a juicy page-turner by my standards, and I've been not a teenager for a very long time. I would like to imagine that this book is also instantly engaging to a wide range of young readers and reading levels.
To be continued...
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