Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
My rating: 2/5 cats
I was horny, and scared, and so confused about everything.
that pretty much sums up the book – main character austin puts the q in lgbtq as he is torn between his equally powerful romantic feelings for his girlfriend shann and his best friend robby, in a situation as turbulent as the one where the giant superbugs are taking over the planet.
i’m as confused as austin about my feelings towards this book. for some reason, i thought this book was universally beloved, but i see that most of my friends on here were as dissatisfied as i was with it.
this is a book that would probably do better with its intended audience of teenage boys than with the adult women who make up such a huge portion of the YA readership.
my uncharacteristic two stars cats isn’t even for the things that i think the majority of female readers were turned off by – the constant talk about masturbation and horniness and BO and erections and balls (subset – the naming of balls, getting hit in the balls, the loss of balls by accident or misadventure, the sperm that comes out of balls) or even the way the female love interest is sidelined and reduced to stock complaints, pouting, View Spoiler »
but that’s not the reason i wasn’t crazy about this. it’s a combination of too much repetition and too little character development. because not only is shann barely there as a character, but so are robby and austin. for a love triangle, we get nothing to show us why any of these people are supposed to be desirable (except for shann’s boobs, hair and skin, mentioned constantly, and robby’s perfect neck and jaw). how are two people in love with austin and why are they so patient while he hems and haws and manages to get everything he wants by not choosing one way or another?? i just don’t understand why he is in such demand, and how he managed to find two people who have the patience of saints when he’s both selfish and uninteresting.
but the repetition is an even bigger problem – ugh. i know it’s a conscious decision to keep making the same statements and trotting them out again and again to show how history folds over on itself in recurring patterns and there’s nothing new under the sun and everything is connected but it just drained me.
i mean, i understand that teenage boys think about sex a lot, but just from a random page-flip just now:
–Thinking about a book like that made me very horny
–Thinking about me and Robby going to Sweden made me horny
–Hearing her say the words do that made me very horny.
–I was horny
–The three of us danced together. It made me very horny.
–Sounding father-like to Shann in the echoing darkness of the staircase that led nowhere made me feel horny
and the constant usage of “dynamo,” the hundreds of cigarettes smoked, the recurring refrain of And that was our day. You know what I mean, and the countless other recycled words and phrases – after a while, you just want to scream “ENOUGH!”
there’s also a tendency to forgo contractions, which makes the dialogue sound really strained:
“Please do not shoot us in the balls, EJ Elgin. It is only me, Robby Brees, and my friend, Austin Szerba, who is your next-door neighbor, and we are not rat boys from Mars. We come in peace, and smoking cigarettes.”
and
“I will come over on Monday and get drunk with you.”
it’s a shame, because there are some really nicely-phrased parts setting up the quiet smalltown iowa atmosphere that i really liked, but there were too few of those and too much of the stuff that drove me crazy:
Nobody was out there.
This was Ealing at nighttime.
Nobody ever had any reason to be out, unless they were standing on the curb watching their house burn down.
and
We never heard sirens in Ealing. It’s not that bad things never happened here, it’s just that nobody ever bothered to complain about it when they did.
but the rest is all snips balls and snails horny and puppy dog tails sperm, which isn’t something i usually take issue with, but here it just seems to be going for shock value thrills by its sheer overabundance, like it’s just trying to get banned from school libraries. (the story about how austin was accidentally responsible for The Chocolate War being removed from his lutheran school’s library seems almost like a nose-thumb, along with the resulting line “Stupid people should never read books.”) again, just a random page-flip, and you come across many many words that have historically gotten books banned by “the concerned.”
page 242:
semen, testicles, shit, shit, sperm
page 124:
drug, heroin, pot, heroin, heroin, fuck, drugs, fucks, fuck, fuck, fucked, fucked, fucked, dope, penis, shit, fucked, fucking, fucking, cigarettes,
page 36:
masturbation, masturbation, cigarette, masturbating, masturbating, masturbate, masturbated, horny, masturbating, shit
i’m no prude, so it doesn’t bother me, but people who go out of their way to be provocative and “shocking” kind of embarrass me a little.
so yeah – the repetition bothered me, the barely-there love interests, austin’s shitty treatment of people, the lack of resolution of storylines (why was robby’s dad’s story in there at all?), and the ending which “more or less” shows that austin has learned nothing about consequences and everything’s shitty for everyone else while he flits around doing whatever he wants and View Spoiler »
although the giant killer bugs were cool, i guess.
