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Summary
Summary
Meet a teenage hero who likes nothing better than to sit back with a bucket of fried chicken and a girlie magazine, waiting for his family plumbing fortune to come to him. But when our hero gets into some serious trouble, he's forced to volunteer at a local soup kitchen where he finds himself at the center of a struggle between the rich and the poor, the selfish and the selfless. It is a worthy cause he could care less about until the day he stumbles across a shocking piece of information. What happens next surprises everybody, including our very reluctant hero.
Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Goodlooking) Hero is a novel of adventure, intrigue, Ukrainian dance lessons, disruptive horseplay, inappropriate ogling and some truly heroic consumption of junk food. Adrian Mole meets South Park in this often outrageous and always hilarious trip into the inner world of a boy teetering on the brink of manhood.
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8-10-Fergus captures perfectly the voice of the unnamed 13-year-old narrator who is resolutely selfish and self-serving, prurient and rude, sarcastic and frequently indignant. With a penchant for girlie magazines and fried chicken, he is yearning for puberty and looking forward to Sex Ed class, since his father has not been much help in advising him. He expects the family business, House of Toilets, will someday bring him a fortune. His mother gives him a tape recorder in the hope that it will help him stop speaking his mind to adults. The novel is his recorded thoughts and observations. After a move to Winnipeg, his mother forces him to volunteer at a soup kitchen, where he becomes involved in a struggle between the local merchants who want the soup kitchen and the homeless removed, and the do-gooders who want to save it. He could care less, until he discovers that a classmate would go hungry without it. His transformation from ego-centered insensitivity to compassion for others is heartening, if a bit hasty. While there are many references to sex, it is merely wishful fantasy. With the boy's flippant attitude and glibly advanced possession of language skills, the book has many laugh-out-loud moments. Giving himself a hickey with the breast pump his mother, a lactation nurse, uses in her job, is a memorable moment. This story is sure to appeal to teens who like their narrators edgy, quirky, outrageous, and hilarious.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
(Middle School) Like Adrian Mole, only exponentially more obnoxious, Fergus's unnamed, self-centered thirteen-year-old narrator obliviously plays the buffoon in his own audio diary. He's been directed by a guidance counselor to use a journal as a warehouse for his many inappropriate and insensitive observations, and his wickedly funny tape-recorded musings brim with misplaced bravado, as when he recounts puzzlement at failing to get on the good side of a teacher at his new school in Winnipeg by complimenting her looks. (""I thought it was working well until today after school, when I mentioned that I know a lot of men who prefer full-figured women."") Fergus pushes this humorous caricature to the limit, and, not a moment too soon, introduces a chance for him to develop at least a sliver of social conscience. A campaign to save the Holy Light Mission soup kitchen pitches our hapless hero into a moral conundrum involving his father (who, as a local merchant, seems obligated to side with the business owners working to shut down the soup kitchen) and his own loyalties as an initially reluctant Mission volunteer. In the end, Fergus's narrator hasn't totally transformed from the guy who not long before used a breast pump to give himself fake hickeys. Still, he has convincingly grown to have compassion for the people the Mission served, the people who, as he puts it, ""everyone else had forgotten."" Copryight 2007 of The Horn Book, Inc. All rights reserved. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A 13-year-old boy yearning for puberty and junk food finds himself sucked into a passionate fight to save a soup kitchen, despite his own resolutely selfish instincts. Possessed of a flippant attitude and advanced language skills, the glib young hero is the school cut-up. After pulling one too many pranks, he's forced to keep a taped diary and to volunteer at the local soup kitchen, an establishment derided by the surrounding businesses, one of which his wealthy grandmother owns. He thinks he couldn't care less, until he learns that one of his friends must eat there or go hungry. Fergus keeps the comic patter galloping along, all the while touching on issues of importance to emerging adolescent boys. She keeps it light and often hilarious, yet eventually touching, until the hero really becomes a hero. It's a first-rate debut. Extraordinarily witty, zippy and entertaining throughout. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
