Character, Driven

Gr 10 Up—At the center of this hilarious offering is an adorably awkward protagonist. Cliff's first-person and sometimes second-person narration, rendered in an affable, funny, and talkative tone, will suck readers into his life story immediately. He is a 17-year-old boy with a crush on a girl, Jillian, but he has no idea how to talk to her. He also has a difficult home life, partly because of his unemployed and angry, often cruel father and his overworked mother. Cliff works two jobs, and his father doesn't want him to go to college. The book is light on plot in the beginning, and the pacing is measured. The tone and the writing, which will appeal to fans of Jesse Andrews's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, are what shine here. Cliff breaks the fourth wall often, adding rich layers to this creative work of metafiction. Lubar plays with tropes expertly, crafting a deeply relatable young man whom readers won't soon forget. While some of the material is more appropriate for older teenagers, it's always authentic (for instance, Cliff describes an idealized version of a sexual encounter and then presents the much more awkward but realistic version).