Some Readings That Often Induced "Huh?"

I love this book.

Hooray!

For one thing, this book is a cliched masterpiece. In Tenderloin, Iowa, the fictional or possibly non-fictional capital of meat raising/killing/eating, there is nothing to do. Two relatively small boys were forced to relocate to this town, and because of it, things begin to go badly. The high school includes the stereotypes pulled straight from the earliest of the 90's. There are mullet-wearing jocks, overall-sporting cheerleaders, and the very sad few who fit into neither of these. After all, what is there to do in rural Minnesota besides football or cheerleading?

What would YOU do in Tenderloin, Iowa?

For one, Pill likes Arson. That's right, the oldest of these relatively small boys is named Pill. Pill-bug to his younger brother, Dough. Something tells me these boys are not from a normal family. They live in a trailer park, and are sons of some madman living far far away from his family. This just happens to be the man who named the poor boys. Who knew? For little Dough, things aren't much better. He enjoys drawing gladiators and the executions of a small unfortunate looking chatterbox named Lottie. He also has the hots for his teacher.

This is where things start to get wrong. The boys living in a trailer park are babysat by a 28 yr old waitress named Val. She reminds me vaguely of someone from the movie waitress, with her short yellow uniform complete with stark white apron, shoes, and paper hat. This is all fine, as anyone in uniform usually conforms to some stereotype to some degree. However, this waitress enjoys serving her middle school guests gin and water, as well as inviting cowboys and truckers in to her shiny Christmas-light-clad trailer for sleepovers at night. An average reader would be slightly put-off by this, but not I. It's a trailer park, and frankly I never had high expectations for these characters. It looked as if the miserable lives of the characters were becoming more illegal and mundane with every new paragraph.

And then a large drunk cowboy sliced through the screen door with a switchblade and attempted to kill the two boys and their sitter.

"Huh?"

Once again, I put away the book.