For both teenagers and adults.

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jsmithy332 Avatar

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The dustjacket for this is one of those horrible uncoated affairs that make me feel like I'm crawling with insects just to touch it--the inside flaps are coated, so why couldn't they just coat the whole cover? I wish book and magazine publishers would learn just how unpleasant this is for a lot of people. It's like listening to fingernails scratching on a blackboard, only it comes from the vile, shivery feeling in your fingertips!

The light-blue, slightly greenish light-blue paper-covered hardback cover is pretty cheap-looking. Nothing wrong with it, it just looks kind of cheap like Book-Of-the-Month Club covers used to look 50 years ago (and ever since then, also?).

And the pages are glued, and they're not even glued in as signatures or choirs of pages, but as individual pages. So it's basically just bound like a paperback. I'm not hard on books, but I wonder how well this will hold up.

I liked our hero, and the way the author writes about him and his family is really good. It's naturalistic and literary in its use of language, without being artsy. The family members have a good rapport, and you feel that they really care about each other.

I think I enjoyed the fact that there was a lot of humor in the way the main character was portrayed. It's part of that whole "teenage" thing--there are worries and insecurities, but the character has some of the same stumbling verve as a young puppy exploring the world.

I think both teenagers and adults would have to enjoy this.