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Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | TEEN FICTION LYG | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Josh Mendel has a secret. Unfortunately, everyone knows what it is.
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Five years ago, Josh's life changed. Drastically. And everyone in his school, his town--seems like the world--thinks they understand. But they don't--they can't. And now, about to graduate from high school, Josh is still trying to sort through the pieces. First there's Rachel, the girl he thought he'd lost years ago. She's back, and she's determined to be part of his life, whether he wants her there or not.Then there are college decisions to make, and the toughest baseball game of his life coming up, and a coach who won't stop pushing Josh all the way to the brink. And then there's Eve. Her return brings with it all the memories of Josh's past. It's time for Josh to face the truth about what happened.
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;If only he knew what the truth was . . .
Author Notes
Barry Lyga was born on September 11, 1971. He received a BA in English from Yale University in 1993. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked in the comic book industry for ten years. His first young adult novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, was published in 2006. His other works include Boy Toy, Hero-Type, Goth Girl Rising, I Hunt Killers, After the Red Rain, and as the Archvillain series for middle-grade readers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When Josh was a 12-year-old seventh grader, he was sexually abused by his history teacher, the young, beautiful (and married) Eve, who manipulated him into believing they were in love. Carefully crafting a narrative structure, Lyga flashes between that traumatic time and the present, when Josh, now a senior (at the school where The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl took place), learns that Eve is being paroled. The author handles heavy material with honesty and sensitivity, capturing both the young Josh's excitement and his realization that his "pleasure brought its own sort of guilt." Years later, he still struggles: he flies into rages (he punches a baseball coach in an opening scene), and he experiences "flickers," brief moments which feel like actual immersions in the past. Josh also has trouble pursuing Rachel, who seems like a perfect match, because he cannot trust his physical instincts; he is, as his psychologist puts it, "afraid to do anything at all because it might be the wrong thing." Details like Josh's obsession with calculating baseball statistics round out his character; the statistics speak to his intelligence and, more tellingly, to his attempts to control his world. Even his inevitable face-off with Eve proves a revelation. Readers may find the ending too neat, given the extent of Josh's problems, but in their richness and credibility the cast-Eve included-surpasses that of the much-admired Fanboy. Ages 16-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Whenever a book for young adults moves the bar sexually, it demands a closer look. Rainbow Party (2005), a treatise on oral sex by Paul Ruditis, does that in a crude, sensationalistic way. Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves (1997) is a finely crafted novel about a girl whose affair with an adult suits her purposes until a murder intervenes. Now comes Barry Lyga's novel, also about an affair, but here the boy is 12, and the woman is his teacher. The story is told by 18-year-old Josh Mendel. A fine mathematician, an equally able baseball player, he suffers from flashbacks he calls flickers. Readers are shocked into the story during the midst of one of his early flickers. He's at his friend Rachel's house, and the kids are in a closet, kissing. Then something happens, something ugly, though readers are not sure quite what. Move forward five years. Josh has not spoken to Rachel since, but now that graduation is drawing near, she reaches out to him. He's tempted but is held back by the memory of his relationship with his history teacher, Eve Sherman. Josh explains to the reader, sometimes in shocking detail, just what transpired. Under the guise of needing Josh to take some tests for a graduate-school project, lovely Eve begins bringing the boy to her apartment. Eventually, the test taking tapers off, and the kissing begins. Then things go further, much further. It is only after the incident in the closet, where it is eventually revealed that Josh ripped off Rachel's panties and started to do things Eve taught him, that the truth of the student-teacher sexual relationship becomes public. Once again, the story fast-forwards, and Josh, in his first-person narrative, chronicles his evolving relationship with Rachel and his tribulations on the baseball diamond as he tries to take back control of his life. When he is unable to perform sexually with Rachel after the prom, he breaks down and recounts the details of Eve's trial: how he refused to testify against her, how he believed he was in love with her and she with him. Then, in the final pages, Josh confronts Eve, who is now out of prison. Facing her, as well as the anger, fear, and confusion their relationship stirs in him, finally allows him to be free. A story about a pretty teacher seducing a boy has a ripped from the headlines quality about it. Perhaps the most famous real-life case is that of Mary Kay Letourneau and her 13-year-old boyfriend (whom she later married), but there have been others. The 2006 movie Notes on a Scandal brought a similar scenerio to the big screen. Nor is this the first YA book to deal with student-teacher relationships. Melvin Burgess' raunchy Doing It (1996), which discusses sex in a dizzying array of contexts, comes to mind, but in that book, the boy is an older teen and the teacher 20. Eve Sherman is twice the age of Josh, and while the story accurately chronicles the way children are often groomed by their predators for sexual activities, the descriptions of what goes on between the two of them are sometimes so graphic that they border on soft porn: She dropped to her knees and unbuckled my belt, then skinned down my pants, and underpants. I was ready for her already, and she dived down, darting her head like a starving bird. . . . She stopped. Watch me, she groaned. Watch.' With the sexuality of a boy at the core of the story, the writing supporting it should be meticulous; otherwise, the author's exploration of a risky subject can easily be reduced to a gimmick. Brock Cole got it right in The Facts Speak for Themselves, where he so compellingly transcribes young Linda's unemotional voice as she describes everyday details and shocking events in equal measure. Lyga, author of the popular Fan Boy and Goth Girl (set in the same high school as Boy Toy), fashions a heavier burden for himself: he tries to tie so many plotlines together, the story staggers under the weight of the storytelling. The baseball subplot, complete with Josh's antagonistic relationship with his coach, sometimes seems like it belongs in another book. Another story thread about Josh's parents' devolving relationship is a distraction. Much more successful is the character development throughout. As in his previous book, Lyga's cast feels very real, and he knows how to play the characters against each other. Josh's interactions with Rachel and Eve dovetail neatly, and Lyga astutely laces Josh's feelings about his mother into that configuration. The book ends with a revelation that is surprising, if not quite believable. What will seem believable for readers is Josh's emotional journey. This is someone who has experienced sex and has experienced love, confused the two, and now, thanks to Rachel, knows the difference. Teens, who think they know so much about sexuality, may see the subject in a new way here. And if they garner the same understanding Josh does, Lyga's vivid use of sex scenes just may be worth it.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A teenager is haunted by an affair with his teacher. BARRY LYGA'S new novel, "Boy Toy," takes one of the more uncomfortable themes of young adult literature - a sexual relationship between an adult and a minor - and pushes it past the genre's farthest boundaries. This is an upsetting, intense, intricately drawn portrait of the fallout from a 12-year-old boy's involvement with his seventh-grade teacher. Sexual transgressions come in all forms in young adult literature. R.A. Nelson's eerie "Teach Me" (2005) explored an 18-year-old student's violent obsessions after an affair with her teacher. In last year's "Gone," by Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, a high-school graduate sleeps with his former teacher the summer after his senior year. At first glance, Josh Mendel, the narrator of "Boy Toy," seems an unlikely type for an obsession with an older woman. He's a math whiz who's gotten straight A's since the third grade and has a top batting average on the baseball field. But Lyga fuses Josh's outwardly aggressive jock sensibility with an inner fragility - similar to the geeky isolation of the hero in his well-received first novel, "The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl" (2006) - and creates something unexpected. Any assumptions we might make about Josh's character are upended by the story's conclusion. The novel's action moves between past and present as Josh, now a senior, struggles to tell his story to Rachel, a girl he nearly victimized himself just before the affair with his teacher, Eve, was discovered: "How can I describe it? I'm a completely different person now. It's a different world. Eve's 30 and free and a registered sex offender, and me? I'm just muddling through, hitting the ball, slamming straight A's, doing all the easy things in life." Eve had been sent to prison, but at the beginning of the novel Josh learns that she's getting out. Now even a trip to the local market turns into a panic attack when he thinks he sees her: "I thought it was over, but it's not. She's out now. She could be here. ... She could be anywhere." Josh's memories of the episode with Rachel (a make-out session spun out of control), like those of his encounters with Eve, are haunting and fragmented. What specifically happened is unclear to the reader and even to Josh, but Rachel's screams and the evidence in his hands (her torn underwear) were enough to leave him overwhelmed with guilt, and, in his own mind at least the "school pariah." Now he's working hard to get a baseball scholarship to college, and he and Rachel are, oddly, rekindling their relationship - if only he could shake the obsessive flashbacks to Eve. Those flashbacks are full of a teenage awe and passion that may cause many readers to raise an eyebrow. The language suggests that Josh was in love with Eve, but the reader can feel only an intense disquiet. Lyga seems to suggest that intentions are everything, especially Eve's, but the reader never gets much of a fix on her motives. In a culture so saturated with sex, where 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears's pregnancy is common knowledge to fifth graders, what are teenagers to make of this book? What Lyga gives only glimpses of, through Josh's difficulty connecting to Rachel (or almost anyone else in his life), is the collateral damage caused by child abuse. Still, the novel vividly explores the gray areas between love, lust, right and wrong. Josh has nearly convinced himself that he bears the responsibility for the affair with Eve, rather than the other way round - until he's finally able to end that chapter for good. "Boy Toy" is an unsettling read, but that's exactly what it ought to be. / Barry Lyga's novel explores the gray areas between love, lust, right and wrong. / Jack Martin is the assistant coordinator of young adult services at the New York Public Library.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-For the past five years, Joshua Mendel has struggled with the aftermath of being sexually abused by his seventh-grade history teacher. Now a high school senior, he still experiences "flickers," his name for vivid, mini-flashbacks of his times with Eve. He still refuses to associate with Rachel, his seventh-grade romantic interest whose insistence on a game of spin the bottle at a party led to the exposure of his abuse, a trial, and Eve's imprisonment. Rachel is eager to resume their long-abandoned tentative romance, Eve has been released from prison, and Josh wants nothing more than to win a baseball scholarship to a college far from his small town where he feels certain everyone knows about his past. Despite years of counseling, Josh is unable to move on until he reveals the complete details of his experiences with Eve to Rachel and to his friend, Zik, and finally learns to accept the truth about it. Short groups of chapters set in the present alternate with much lengthier segments entitled "Flashbacks, Not Flickers," in which Josh describes his relationship with Eve from the beginning to the emotionally wrenching trial. The well-paced plot begins slowly, describing Eve's initial approaches to Josh as she wins his confidence and loyalty, then speeds up as their more frequent contacts move into the realm of inappropriate teacher/student behavior. Lyga's skillful writing subtly reveals Eve's cleverly calculated abuse of Josh in a way that older teens will find fascinating, distressing, and worthy of their attention.-Ginny Gustin, Sonoma County Library System, Santa Rosa, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Striking out on a baseball bet forces a teen to face past emotional scars. At age 13, Joshua Mendel's history teacher, Eve Sherman, molested him for three weeks and changed the rest of his life. Five years later, the 18-year-old baseball star is preparing to graduate and working on restoring his damaged relationship with Rachel, a childhood crush. When Sherman is released from prison, Joshua realizes he must confront her in an attempt to gain the answers to the questions that have haunted him for years. Blending present events with extensive flashbacks, Lyga creates a tightly paced narrative that explores psychological turmoil without resorting to either clinical terminology or oversimplification. Authentic and fresh, the narrative voice develops along with Joshua, gaining experience but never overpowering the tortured undertones. Lyga's portrayal of the fight between Joshua and Sherman's husband is riveting and tense; the main character's later reflections on that confrontation are equally powerful. Deftly weaving together a painful confession and ambiguous ending, Lyga's dynamic writing style creates an emotionally wrenching and haunting tale. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Ten Things I Learned at the Age of Twelve 1. The Black Plague was transmitted by fleas that were carried throughout Europe by rats. 2. If you first paralyze it, you can cut open a frog and watch its lungs continue to inflate and deflate. 3. There are seven forms of the verb to be: am, being, been, is, was, were, and are. 4. In order to divide fractions, you invert the divisor to arrive at the reciprocal, which is then multiplied by the dividend. (Mixed fractions must first be converted to improper fractions.) 5. In Salem, the witches weren't burned at the stake--they were pressed to death under big rocks . . . or hanged. 6. Islam was founded in the year 610. It is the third of three world religions worshiping the same God. 7. Each point on a "coordinate plane" (created by the joining of an x-axis and a y-axis) can be described by an ordered pair of numbers. 8. "Monotheism" is a belief system centered on a single deity, while "polytheism" subscribes to belief in multiple deities. 9. The area of a circle can be determined by using the formula pr2, where r is the radius of the circle. 10. How to please a woman. Excerpted from Boy Toy by Barry Lyga All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
