Book Review: King Dork

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

So I just finished reading King Dork by Frank Portman. It had been getting a lot of pre-release buzz and so I picked it up.

The buzz is quite well-justified. It's a Young Adult book with no sci-fi, military or zeppelins, but I quite enjoyed it anyway. The book basically covers the life of one Tom "King Dork" Henderson. He goes to the prototypical American High School Hell and is among the lowest of the low. His only friend, Sam, is the guy who was ahead of him alphabetically in grade school. Life is a bleak, unending wasteland of misery and humiliation (the way it always is in high school). The only bright spot is the band that he and Sam are going to form just as soon as they settle on a band name, stage names, Album cover and title (oh, and also get some guitars and a drummer...and maybe learn how to play).

Then Tom finds a copy of Catcher in the Rye that was owned by his father, who died under mysterious circumstances when Tom was eight. Within the book is a coded message and that sends Tom off on a quest to find out more about his father. Things get decidedly strange from there.

Although the world of San Francisco high schools in the late 90's is quite different than my high school experience, my inner loser really appreciated the book and empathized with Tom (yeah, yeah, the same name helps a lot). Everyone and everything comes in for a lot of teen-age cynicism. There's a glossary of terms (as Tom defines them) and a list of the numerous bands Tom and Sam come up with during the book (and there are a lot), both of which are fun treats at the end. The only thing missing is a complete list of the books Tom's dad read as a teenager that Tom re-reads.

But yeah, the book is funny, has a decided teenage outlook that's really captured well and it's something I think a lot of kids would find more relevant today than, say Catcher in the Rye.



OK, also, there's a bit of teenage sex in the book. It's explicit, but it's just blowjobs and groping and all the other confused sexual encounters you have when you're a teenager (well, if you were the kind of teen that actually *had* sexual encounters). So I think that it's done pretty well.

But it does make me think about sex in books for teenagers. On the one hand, I'm totally ok with sex in books for teenagers. On the other hand, I feel that if you're going to have sex in a book for teenagers, you should make an effort to be sex positive. On the third hand, when there is sex in books, it makes it harder for me to generally recommend it to people who might be looking for books for their teenagers.

Ignoring that last part for a bit, how positive is the sex in King Dork? Well, it's pretty male-centric. It's never very clear that the girls are doing anything more than servicing the guy. Sex is often just one more weapon in the arsenal of High School social wars. Everyone has multiple partners, everyone pays observence to the idea of monogamy.

Right, so some of this just for narrative purposes, some of it is probably a fairly real reflection of messed up teen-age sexual experiences, some of it is exaggerated and some of it is me having no clue. It also seems clear that, especially in the realm of cheating on everyone, Tom's choices will probably have some disastrous fall-outs in the long run. Finally, there is a really sweet bit about the Sex Alliance Against Society, which is about the nicest metaphor for love I've seen in a long time.

In the end, I don't expect kids to run out and do the things in the book (or at least, the book won't encourage them to do something they didn't already want to do), but I do wish that maybe the book had given a little more depth to the girls.



later
Tom

Comments

re: teenage sex

[etherial.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't care if novels are sex-positive, as long as they're safe-sex positive. I'd rather have healthy repressives than liberated people dropping like flies.