Meet Will Carter, but feel free to call him Carter. (Yes, he knows it's a lazy nickname, but he didn't have much say in the matter.) Here are five things you should know about him:
1. He has a stuttering problem, particularly around boobs and belly buttons.
2. He battles Attention Deficit Disorder every minute of every day...unless he gets distracted.
3. He's a virgin, mostly because he's no good at talking to girls (see number 1).
4. He's about to start high school.
5. He's totally not ready.
Join Carter for his freshman year, where he'll search for sex, love, and acceptance anywhere he can find it. In the process, he'll almost kill a trombone player, face off with his greatest nemesis, suffer a lot of blood loss, narrowly escape death, run from the cops (not once, but twice), get caught up in a messy love triangle, meet his match in the form of a curvy drill teamer, and surprise the hell out of everyone, including himself.
Carter himself was a great character. Deep down, he was a decent guy but still managed to act like a clueless jerk most of the time. But changing from a preteen to a teen sucks, and I love how the author captured the good with the bad. He sinks to peer pressure just as much as he sometimes rises about it. I liked learning about ADD and thought it was really interesting to learn a bit about its affects.
The most disturbing part... Carter is only 14/15 when all of these things happen. It seems so young, almost too young. I'm not going to say it's unrealistic just because it wasn't my experience, but shit. It gives some insight into how some people evolved over 8th grade break, for sure! Even though there was a lot of teen drinking, I like that pretty much every drinker made a spectacular ass of themselves. Didn't glorify it in the least.
NICK PODEHL deserves more than five stars. He's my new favorite narrator!
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