Winger, by Andrew Smith

Ryan Dean West doesn’t have the greatest self-confidence. But despite being a junior at just fourteen years old, on the scrawny side, and with, in his opinion, the highest degree of “loserosity” imaginable, he is determined that this year is going to be the year he gets his s**t together: mostly by surviving rooming with Pine Mountain Academy’s biggest bully, Chas Becker, and winning the girl of his dreams, best friend Annie Altman.

But Ryan Dean – or Winger, the nickname earned by his position on the school’s rugby team – has a talent for getting into trouble, even when he doesn’t mean to. As term progresses he is seduced by the smoking hot Megan Renshaw (girlfriend of, incidentally, the room-mate he’s quietly terrified of), becomes the multiple receiver of curse-spells from the distinctly un-hot Mrs. Singer, and is quickly hemorrhaging friends. Can he find a way to get out of this mess?

Winger is a small piece of genius. It is funny and heart-breaking and truthful.

Admittedly, Ryan Dean’s “year of change” doesn’t have the most auspicious start – upside down in toilet – but what, though, is the worst that he thinks can happen? Beaten to death by Chas for (a) making out with Megan and (b) being a general loser? Losing Annie? Suffering a catastrophic penis injury? Ryan Dean might think he’s a terrible loser, but I rather suspect that every teenage boy probably feels the way that he does about himself and about the world. If only I’d known when I was teenager what (I believe) I know now about the mind of a teenage boy…

Winger, though, starts off as one kind of story but gradually becomes something else altogether – like real life, there are twists and turns and corners you can’t see around; events lurking out of sight that no matter how good and brave and full of love Ryan Dean is, he will be powerless to change.

Earlier in the year, Andrew Smith wrote an article about our tendency to put people (and books) into boxes, to create labels about what a person should or shouldn’t be, or make assumptions about what a particular label means. Right from the beginning of Winger, it is clear that Ryan Dean understands the power of words and labels. Despite his rather unfortunate and hypocritical habit of putting girls into certain boxes, he’s none-the-less well aware that that one word can make you feel different, that one word can make people view you in a wholly different way. “Adorable” is the word that Ryan Dean has a complicated relationship with. For his friend Joey, it’s another word: gay. Before the end of his story, it will be brought home to Ryan Dean in the worst way imaginable how easily words can turn your life upside down.

This book is so slickly told, so tightly plotted, the scenarios so well laid out, you see things happening just that micro-second before they do – just enough of a head start to create that plunge of the stomach, flutter of the heart and a reverberating “oh, no…” to echo through your head. There are hints of the quirky style and sense of humour so evident in Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle, but tamed down a little, and the text is interwoven with Venn diagrams, pie charts, block charts, cartoons, imaginary conversations and letters that add a certain je ne sais quoi to Ryan Dean’s thoughts and emotions. This is The Great American Novel, the YA generation. Looking for Alaska meets The Art of Fielding, with the Andrew Smith magic thrown in.

Can Ryan Dean tame his inner Wild Boy and, against all the odds, win the girl?

Looking for Alaska, by John Green

In Looking for Alaska, Miles leaves his cosy, parental home for an Alabama boarding school. Sixteen years old and searching for ‘The Great Perhaps’ - aka, looking for his life to begin - on his first day at Culver Creek, Miles meets the Colonel, smokes his first cigarette, and falls in love with Alaska. Troubled wild child, Alaska is a mystery waiting to be unravelled. Swinging hot and cold, she gives glimmers of her past before shutting down and heading off to the next thing. Can Miles uncover her truths? And does he really want to?

In the children’s department of Waterstones Truro, John Green has the status of something akin to a god. Staff come and go, but for as long as I can remember there have always been at least two members of the team who worship him and his writing - to the point, even, where I’m kind of surprised there isn’t an actual shrine to him. And so, as the latest anointed member of ‘team kids’, I had to wonder, is he all that he’s cracked up to be?

Truth be told, I had my first encounter with John Green about two months ago with Paper Towns. This is the story of Quentin, high school boy, following - or attempting to follow - a set of obscure clues left for him by cute-girl-next-door, Margo. She has disappeared and Quentin is determined to find her, determined that somewhere in the weird messages she left him, there is clue to what happened to her and where she has gone. There was a point about half way through Paper Towns that left me just on the edge of bored, as Quentin’s search stalled and he became just a little too obsessed with his quest, but I was definitely impressed with Green’s style and story - impressed enough to want to read more.

“Paper Towns is good,” my Green-o-phile colleague Natt told me. “But Looking for Alaska is better.”

And was it? Well, much like Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska is peopled with likeable characters and a compelling story. Both books are very well written (by which I mean that nothing grated, nothing irritated me, the language and the style were consistent), and both books are set in the real world (by which I mean there is nothing supernatural going on, and no re-imaginings of society). But what struck me most about Looking for Alaska is that, in essence, it was the same as Paper Towns. Same basic premise: slightly geeky teenage boy trying to figure out (or rescue?) troubled teenage girl. This left me wondering, is this all that John Green can write about?

At first, that question, that thought, made me feel disappointed. After all the amazing things I’d heard about this guy, are all his books going to be the same? But then I realised two things.

Firstly, they are not the same. Like Natt said, Looking for Alaska is a better book than Paper Towns. The absolute basics may be the same, but Looking for Alaska is a much more mature story - not more mature as in having more mature content (ie. sex etc, although there is a sex scene), but more mature as in how Green handles and presents the issues that Miles and his friends are dealing with.

And secondly, even though there are similarities, it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is this: John Green writes about important issues, particularly those that growing teenagers are facing, with grace and aplomb.

Ooh, I really like that word. Aplomb. “Calm self-assurance and poise; from French a plomb, straight up and down,” my dictionary tells me. This does to seem to sum up Green’s writing quite succinctly. And, what’s more, reading the reviews that teenage customers have been writing for Looking for Alaska on Waterstones.com, shows that this is exactly the kind of book that teenagers need, both for good quality reading and to assess the realities of life.

This explains Green’s following and the spawning of the nerdfighters: a community of people around the world fighting to ‘increase awesome and decrease suck’. Plus I find myself extremely impressed by John Green’s website/blog, on which he and his brother Hank post a series of short video logs tackling subjects as varied as farts, sex, video games, intellectualism and politics. Even as a grown-up and theoretically already versed in these things (I am so not versed in these things), I couldn’t help but find the video ‘Thoughts on romance and sex in an airport’ enlightening and wise. This is just the sort of guy that kids should be looking up to.

And so I must concede and bow down at the genius of John Green. Now, about that shrine...