From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up–Will Avery, 18, has had it with life in the English suburbs with his mother and her boyfriend, so he takes a room in a house with three roommates. Rocko, a painter, is sweetly, childishly innocent, yet prone to fits of rage. James is loud, oversexed, and lives to inflame Rocko. Chrissy owns the house and takes casual, sisterly care of them all. Will falls in love with Zara, an Irish Gypsy who insists that he keep her background a secret from his mother. Unfortunately, that's not even the half of his mom's hang-ups–she freaks out when she finds out Will has sex at all, let alone with a dirty, thieving Gypsy. She forbids their relationship and threatens to divulge Will's own terrible secret to break them up. The first-person narration moves slowly, accentuated by Will's somewhat simplistic telling. The author overwrites her protagonist's wide-eyed wonder at adult life–he falls in love with Zara before they even have a date. Willis has a great ear for the snappy colloquialisms of Irish/English speech, and the story gains pace and humor when she lets the characters talk, especially Zara and her cantankerous parents. Despite believable dialogue, the major characters, especially Will, are one-dimensionally quaint–Zara is sprightly, the Gypsys are scrappy, Rocko's a nutcase, and Will watches, innocent. His deliberate telling makes more sense when his secret is revealed, but this comes too late in the narrative to captivate readers.
–Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Gr. 8-up. What is it with 19-year-old Will? He has left his home, lost his job, and fallen in love with a seemingly unsuitable girl named Zara, a self-described "dirty tinker, stupid didicoi," Gypsy, and Irish Traveler (the book is set in England). And what is it with his new roommates, Rocko, an artist who keeps a frankfurter for a pet, and James, who fancies himself another, more famous James--one with a license to kill? And what about the dark secret Will's mother made him promise never to tell? Might the puzzle have something to do with the scars around Will's eyes, his low IQ, and his nearly nonexistent senses of smell and taste? The mystery will hold most readers' interest, though the answers, when they finally come, are not terribly surprising, and the denouement is not a model of plausibility. Nevertheless, Will remains a sympathetic narrator throughout, and the offbeat information about the plight of Irish Travelers provides an engaging subplot.
Michael CartCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
