REVIEW | About a Boy by Nick Hornby

About a Boy

Nick Hornby

Genre: novel

First published: 1998

Pages: 307

Language: English

Rating: 4/5

Synopsis

Will is thirty-six but acts like a teenager. He reads the right magazines, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also discovered a great way to score with women - at single parents' groups, full of available mothers, all waiting for Mr Nice. That's where he meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old in the world. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Mozart, looks after his mum and he's never even owned a pair of trainers. Perhaps if Will can teach Marcus how to be a kid, Marcus can help Will grow up...

Someone told me once that if you don't enjoy a book while being about 20 pages in, you should put it down and not bother finishing it. If I did exactly that, I would never be able to experience all the feelings this book had to offer. I wasn't really enjoying Marcus and Will's story until I was about 60 pages in, but the good part was worth waiting for. I really enjoyed the book at last.

Will is really such a good character. And I do not mean a good person, I mean a good character. The type of character you despise at first and grow kind of very fond of him during the novel. He's an expert in shutting the life out and not answering the door to it, and only cares about what to do with all of his free time and money since he doesn't have to work because his father once wrote a famous song. He's kind of afraid of commitment and doesn't understand what falling in love is for except for making a wreck out of you. He basically just wants to have fun, and he only ever goes out with women he wants to have sex with. And for some reason, he thinks that making up Ned, a baby he tells single mums he's the father of, is a really good idea. At one of the SPAT!  (Single Parents - Alone Together) meetings he meets Suzie, best friend of Fiona, Marcus' mother. And it's precisely through Suzie that Marcus and Will meet for the first time.

Marcus lives only with his mother, who's simply nuts. She's seriously fucked up and annoying. She forces her beliefs onto her son in arguments that he doesn't have a chance to win, using kind of a psychological abuse (I honestly don't know what else should I call her behaviour). The worst thing is that she actually thinks she makes him think for himself. The truth is, Marcus is annoying and slightly weird as well at the beginning - but with a mother like that, I cannot really blame him, so I'm closing my eyes to that a bit. My heart was breaking for this boy so hard while reading the novel, because his mother is not only crazy and depressed, she's also completely blind to him telling her about being bullied at school.

The day Will and Marcus meet, Fiona tries to overdose and little Marcus finds her covered in her own sick. From that moment on, the whole book is about the developing relationship between these two.  And they're the best thing that has happened to me in a while. Seeing how they go from total strangers, overcome Will's dislike towards kids, and develop this really nice kind of relationship, that's exactly what my little sensitive soul needs to be happy.

The problem with reading a book basically in one sitting is that all the feels come at once. The novel made me laugh, it broke my heart, then it was funny a light again, and then it shattered me completely. It made me laugh out loud. Once I actually had to put the book down and laugh it off properly. It took me about ten minutes to be able to concentrate again without thinking about the funny part. (I won't spoil it but it was seriously that hilarious.) At the other hand, it was breaking my little, fragile heart. It was so real and raw that it made me cry once. I was really pitying Marcus for what he had to go through with his mum, with his classmates, just in overall.

Another thing that I really enjoyed (kind of masochistically), since the book is set in 1993 and 1994, was Hornby's idea to contain Kurt Cobain and his death in the book. It was a perfectly thought idea for the story, since we have a crazy, suicidal mother there. His death somehow gives space to the characters to wonder about life. And with the fact that Kurt is in the book, I have to mention Ellie, a fifteen-year-old who loves Cobain and "befriends" Marcus by accident. I really liked this rebellious girl, she kind of reminded me of myself when I was fifteen. Well done, Nick, you know exactly how to hit the right nail with your hammer, don't you?

I'm just going to say that I really ended up enjoying this book, and that I'm definitely going to check out the film adaptation. If it weren't for the slow start, I would rate About a Boy five stars.