The Story of Some Asshole Kid who fucks up some poor teacher's lifeI gave this two stars, and then decided it's not worth two stars. The book would be crappy but innocent if it wasn't for it's Newberry Award and the blurb from the New York Times, about the story of the main character needing to be shouted out. This story doesn't need to be shouted out, it's a bullshit story, and if I had read this book with some of the patriotic covers I would have probably thrown the thing across the room about half way through it.The title of this review sums up the story. The story is about some jock asshole who doesn't like to have to do any work. He thinks the world owes him something because he can run fast, and if he doesn't like something he has an unfunny little comment to make about it. He believes people should enjoy these unfunny and unintelligent things he says and let him slide through life only having to do what he wants and have everything else given to him. One teacher takes offense at his moronic ways, and when he decides to get her goat by being a nuisance by humming along with the National Anthem: this all blows up to a national thing about him being picked on for being patriotic, he lies a lot and the poor teacher's life is made a living hell. He becomes a poster child for right wing values, and then on the last page we learn that he doesn't know the words to the National Anthem. This is the cliff notes version of the story. It's dumb. It would be harmless if it wasn't an award winning book. It basically tells kids that it's ok to stand up for yourself in any situation, especially when you're being an asshole. Every couple of weeks I get to interact with kids that have the same level of witty remarks as the narrator, I've learned the best way to deal with their middling wit is to turn around really quickly at them, glare and ask them, what did you fucking say to me? The witty one usually looks really scared and sometimes mutters some kind of really dumb apology. I don't know how people deal with teenagers everyday and not kill them. But I'm getting off the point. This kid should have had the shit beaten out of him by someone. If anything this book is a good example of why teachers should be allowed to smack kids around. Besides not liking the whole premise of the book, I also thought it was written like shit. I got an idea Avi, if you're going to write a book entirely with dialog why don't you go listen to how people talk in the real world. The dialog is stilted, but not in the cool David Mamet way. It's all written as if there is no difference between characters, and every character happened to have the speaking ability of a narcissistic ninth grader with the intelligence of a fourth grader. How this won an award is beyond me. I told Karen when I was about thirty pages into this that I want to be a Newberry Award Winning author, it seems like the big criteria is to come up with a eye catchy and edgy format, get a half-baked controversial topic and then just knock that shit out as fast as you can, and you'll be sitting pretty with a book being used in classes all over the country. I've said it already, but it can't hurt to say again, what a load of semi-literate shit.