A rather curious read, and one that I was quite taken with – though I can see why it will have caused some controversy.
My feelings about this book veered from one extreme to the next as I was reading. It’s a hard book to sum up, so I won’t even try, but I will try and make sense of my reaction to it.
Jude, our narrator, reminded me of Justin from Ugly Betty on acid. Everything about him shrieked of wanting attention. He is the star of his own show, and really seems to go out of his way to be provocative. He chooses to wear dresses and make-up to school, every opportunity he gets to make sexualised comments he does and his dramatisation of his life gets a bit grating. That was my first reaction to Jude, but that would be doing him an injustice.
While I found this novel to be a little crass in its expression at times – and I am still naive enough to think that the actions of Jude and his friend Angela are not typical of many fifteen year olds – there were moments when I found myself willing Jude on.
The experience of coming out as a teenager must, at times, be fraught with issues. No matter how advanced we think our society is, the bullying and abuse that Jude experiences at school were horrific. Coupled with the scant details we got of his abusive home life, I felt a real sense of outrage that nobody seemed willing to stand up for Jude in the way I felt he deserved.
Like a number of readers, I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to read this all the way through (which is crazy as it’s such a short book). Slowly I found myself being drawn in by the prolific movie references that shed light on Jude’s character and his situation, and I wanted to see where the writer would take this.
For the first half of the book I was reading in a fairly detached way, but then details started to get under my skin. This was a book that was affecting, and not always in a good way. As the novel drew towards the end I was expecting some Carrie-like homage as Jude took revenge on the offensive idiots who carried out the most obvious hate crimes. What I got floored me. Completely. I had to reread a part of the book several times as I couldn’t believe what had happened.
The image of Jude twirling on the dance floor was one I was expecting to keep in my mind for a while. Then Reid snatched that image, screwed it up, stamped on it and totally destroyed it! A brave move…but it has left me quite stunned.
What stunned me more was when I found out that this novel is based on true events.