3 out of 4 stars
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When I first started reading A Bloody Book by Chris Bowen, I was not sure what I was going to experience. Was it going to be violent, was it a metaphor? It begins with an author’s note to readers, ensuring that it would be both. So that question was answered immediately, but it left me eager to know more, so much to the extent that I struggled to put it down.
Then, we meet Maxx, the protagonist of the story—although, that might be a bit of an overstatement in terms of character—as well as narrator. Immediately I have a sense of who Maxx is. Did I know everything about him, every minute detail of his life? Of course not, but I couldn’t help but feel like I knew him. I began to care for this character, and A Bloody Book serves as his completed assignment he was given by a teacher that cared for him, Mr. Foxx. The assignment in question: when did he stop caring?
As I discovered more about Maxx, hearing details of his life, where it started to go wrong and when he finally stopped caring and accepted his fate in “Reading Hell”, seemingly equivalent to remedial language arts, I realized that I did not only care for Maxx, but that I could empathize with him. Bowen created a realistic portrait of life for an impoverished, defeated boy.
Bowen didn’t stop there, though. It is a given that we should empathize with the main character, but what Bowen did was create a room full of characters that mattered! Characters all facing something different, all responding uniquely. However, the focus is Maxx, and we see his own struggles in life. Faced with poverty, anger, drug and alcohol addiction, and domestic violence within him home, Maxx is a strong individual that was overlooked by the system and suffered for it.
While telling the story of Maxx and the difficulties plaguing him, Bowen did, unfortunately, have some errors in grammar and spelling—for example, a misspelled “Santa Clause”, missing hyphens and misplaced quotation marks, and sentence fragments. Something else I noticed was that many sentences began with “and”; after deliberation though, this appears to be a stylistic choice that reflects the voice of the narrator rather than the author’s knowledge of writing.
Overall, A Bloody Book receives 3 out of 4 stars. An emotional, intriguing tale of a young boy and the obstacles he overcame, the only reason I cannot give it a four is the lack of professional editing quality. I recommend this book for anyone that has faced their own struggles in life, knows someone that has, or works with children. I mention the latter because Bowen presents a view often left unheard, the child only trying to survive, and I believe that it is important to understand this struggle when working with children. I do not recommend reading this if you are searching for a happy, lighthearted story: this is not that book. If you are mentally and emotionally prepared for it, I highly recommend A Bloody Book.
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A Bloody Book
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