August 1, 2007
Gr 9 Up-Barry Lyga's first novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) about a smart, geeky, artistic 15-year-old boy comes to life in Scott Brick's performance. Fanboy lives life with a chip on his shoulder, almost content to feel bitter about his parents' divorce, his stepfather, his mother's current pregnancy, the fools at school who include both teachers and fellow students, and his general loneliness. But he also has a sense of humor and some perspective, so he's not entirely alienated from his peers; in fact, he has a friend, Cal, a star athlete, who also is very smart and shares Fanboy's affection for graphic novels. Then Fanboy meets Kyra, a goth girl with requisite attitudeand a body almost as alluring as Dina's, the school's senior heart throb. Brick provides fitting voices for both the teen and adult charactersincluding real life comics artist Brian Michael Bendisthat inculcate the audio with almost cinematic quality. Here's a prose novel that includes lots of descriptive detail about graphic novels, an essentially visual medium, rendered into an aural performance with huge success. Fanboy's embarrassments and eventual personal victories, Kyra's unmasking, and the credibility of their environments at home and at school are vivid and compelling, thanks to both Lyga and Brick."Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA"
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