Dear Life, You Suck by Scott BlagdenCricket is basically an orphan. His parents are druggies who are who knows where. Now living in a home run by nuns, Cricket is less than a year away from being eighteen. Adulthood just around the corner, he’s dealing with all of the usual teen dramas and the added pressures of the life he’s been dealt.
So I probably should have loved this book. Thing is this book just didn’t feel honest to me. Sure boys, especially troubled ones, can be crude. They can be a hodgepodge of things you might not expect to find in one person -- hanging out with drug dealers, watching classic movies, looking out for younger kids, master storyteller, virgin. Whatever, I have no problem with any of that. My problem with this book is that I've known guys like Cricket. Heck, guys like Cricket were basically my only friends for several years, many would sometimes live at our house when I was growing up after their parents simply didn’t care where they ended up. That’s probably why I had such a tough time reading this book. It feels like someone who has never ever met a guy like Cricket wrote this. I couldn’t connect at all to any of the characters.
Teen girls don’t go off on how “handsome” a boy is. I could think of a whole lot of words they’d use before handsome. A teenage boy getting high using the word “Doob”, hello hippie teacher in a sitcom trying to fit in with the kiddies. No teenagers, girl or boy, no matter how crafty is going to speak or think all sing songy slangy the way that Cricket does -- not even crudely 24/7. It’s like the author overheard a few words that a kid spoke and over exaggerated how they speak. It’s’ actually kind of insulting to portray them in such a way even if it’s supposed to make them seem creative.
That said, it was nice to have a book to show a bad boy who is just truly troubled by life and yet still an overall good person. Sadly this book just tried a little too hard.
* Disclaimer: I received this book at no cost in order to review it. I offered no guarantee of a positive review, though I only request books I think I'll like so as not to waste my time.
