Krystal's Reviews > Jasper Jones

And here we have another favourite that did not do it for me.

I don't know why books set in small Australian towns are so freaking dull. I mean, there's a murder mystery! How do you turn that into boring?

In this case, tell the story from a 13-year old boy's POV, and make him a philosophical little snot. Don't forget to throw in a ton of Aussie slang, and have the dialogue spelt incorrectly to convey a typical Aussie yobbo accent, just for good measure.

What a yawn fest.

The plot: Town pariah, 14-year old Jasper Jones, comes to nerd Charlie's window one night with a secret. Charlie gets drawn in and suddenly finds himself questioning everything in FKN EXISTENCE.

Instead of learning more of the mystery surrounding The Body, we get to hear about the racism directed towards Charlie's best friend, Jeffrey, and his Vietnamese family, and how bitchy Charlie's mum is, and how useless his dad is, and how PERRRRTTY Eliza is (and smells. Yeah buddy, that's not weird at all ...) Also, poor Jasper. And cricket. Don't forget cricket.

It's another one of those novels where there is basically no action. Unless you like cricket. (I myself had no fkn clue what was happening in those scenes ... do I look like the kind of person who follows cricket? Honestly.) There is way too much talking and thinking and Charlie is selfish and petulant and, sure, a typical Aussie teenager really, but he was just really painful to read. Turns out I really don't care for being in the mind of a teenage boy. Go figure.

There are so many themes that it's kind of hard to get a grip on what the point is. I mean, obviously racism is a big thing, but this is more evident in the treatment of Jeffrey and his family, rather than Jasper's being half aboriginal. Tbh, there's like one line regarding the latter and it made very little impact on the story. It seemed to me Jasper was an outcast because of his behaviour, and his home life, more than his ancestry.

I guess to me it felt like this book just bit off too many themes. Then neatly wraps them all together at the end and you're just supposed to magically understand all the Big Ideas that have been thrown at you willy nilly in the past 400-odd pages. Meanwhile my mind is still trying to figure out why Jasper is never referred to by just his first name.

I get that this is a book beyond the story - that this is about ideas, and small people standing up to big people, and small minds in small towns, and injustice, etc etc. I GET IT. But it is BORING to read about if nothing is actually happening. Charlie just asks himself a bunch of questions for pages at a time and it doesn't progress anything. It's just monotonous and dull and it bored me so much.

Even the ending took its sweet ass time.

Did not work for me. I was wise to avoid it for so long.

I read this as book 5 of my #dymocks52challenge refined. You can read more here.