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orourke said:
I've usually been an enthusiast for the boarding school story, beginning with "Tom Brown's School Days," and continuing on through others. "A Separate Peace," also comes to mind. When "Looking for Alaska" was published in 2005, I was anxious to read it, but it seemed to elude me at the Bookmobile and bookstores when I had the chance to visit them.
I finally got to read it just recently. It was an ALA selection, and won the Michael Printz Award for YA literature. However, I found it just moderately okay. The theme is of an unpopular, isolated sort of boy bored with life at home and high school in Florida. You might guess Miles is a sort of queer duck when he tells us about his hobby of memorizing the last words of famous people. We get examples scattered through the story ( it is actually an interesting diversion). He decides a little shakeup in his life is needed. Maybe what is needed is to look into the "Great Perhaps," as in the last words of the poet, Francois Rabelais: I go to seek a Great Perhaps." Something in Miles intuition tells him this might be better sought at a boarding school his father attended in Alabama--Culver Creek Preparatory School.
The school is a relatively Spartan facility, but has a solid curriculum of the classics, mathematics, religious services, and tries to maintain vigorous discipline among its students. The students need to work hard to get passing grades, but are forever devising ways to get around the rules against drinking, smoking, commingling after hours in the coed dorms, and dreaming up fantastic, epic pranks to mark each year's senior graduation week.
The usual rivalry of well-off students with working or middle class students creates some tensions--not quite to the intensity of "Tom Brown's School Days," but palpable. Miles is in the middle class category, and his roommate is a savvy, working class boy on scholarship, and he gradually steels Miles into a newly awakened, modern teenager. Alaska is an attractive blond girl, smart, but cryptic in revealing much about herself. An Asian-American boy and a Romanian exchange student round out the circle of friends. Their prodigious drinking exploits, as well as the dated smoking excesses, stretched normal credulity, or so it seemed to one reader. As is no less the case with adults, such abandon might mask insecurities, and lead to personal failures, or even tragedy, which are all elements in the story.
Overall, it was a good read.
tags: boarding school, Alabama, last words of famous people, , I read, I recommend, YA novel, rites-of-passage |
