Customer Reviews

Stuff

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Strong does a great job making up fun words and insults for the characters to use. I can totally relate to the main character Stuff. Probably one of the best books I've ever read.

Stuff is the nickname his family has chosen for young Simon, 14 years old and a Briton by birth. Stuff has ambitions of being a world class cartoonist, and he is aided and abetted by a sympathetic art teacher at school, Miss Kovak, who publishes a weekly art magazine "Art Works" to encourage her more gifted students.

Otherwise Stuff's life is miserable. His parents have divorced, and his dad has imported a sexy live in lover that Stuff called "Sherry Trifle" due to her resemblance to the popular UK dessert. In turn, La Trifle has brought in her own daughter, Natasha, a sexy girl around Stuf's age who torments him with her insults. He is of an age where he is prone to acne ("spots" in British parlance) and thinks about sex every six seconds, as does his best mate, Pete.

Stuff has a lovely girlfriend, Delfine, but he is feeling his oats, and when he meets the punked out "SkY' in art class, quite loses his heart to her and begins drawing a comic srtip in which she appears as a scantily clad superhero, a la Seth Cohen's comic book in the OC. However, Delfine's nasty, brutish brother Darcy is ready to beat Stuff to a pulp if he dares break up with longsuffering Delfine.

Stuff is loveable and adaptable, if never believable. A useful glossary appears in the back of the book which explains some of Stuff's strange UK slang, although other bits remain unexplained. This book is OK, but Stuff's catchphrases are rotten ("How my life goes"?) and it would take a miracle to make this one a success on these shores.