iBoy: Pessimistic, but Paced Well
iBoy by Kevin Brooks is a young adult science fiction.
As a parent I would like to have some information upfront before my child read this book. iBoy has some very real world problems in it and the language to go along with them. The book deals with drugs, gang violence, rape and human trafficking. All of these topics are questionable fare for children. Yes, they are all a part of the real world and some children deal with these topics in their lives. But parents may or may not want their children reading about them.
The plot involves a teenage boy, Tom, heading to visit a long time friend Lucy who lives in the same apartment building. What he doesn’t know is that at the very moment that he’s walking up to the apartment building Lucy is being gang-raped. One of the boys in Lucy’s flat throws an iPhone from 30 floors up and hits Tom in the head with it. Small bits of the phone’s chips end up embedded into his brain.
When Tom wakes up from a coma he quickly learns that he has new abilities. The part that bothered me was how slow he was to figure out what was going on. If you are asking the reader to jump in and go on a ride in your created world, don’t wait around and question the world you created. I caught on in a sentence or two what was going on. It took our Tom another couple of chapters to catch up. That’s way too long to expect me to wait for him to figure it out.
The phone bits become part of Tom. He finds that he can access all phone calls, text messages, and internet sites no matter what the security settings are. He uses his new abilities to right a few wrongs and seek revenge for Lucy. He calls out the gang head honcho. Not surprisingly he’s pulled the tail of a really big, ugly, mean cat. Their showdown is the book’s climax.
There are several things that I really liked about iBoy and several others that I wasn’t as happy about. There’s an overall feeling of pessimism, that nothing can be done to combat gang violence. Tom is not a bad kid, but he’s never been the guy to stand up and take on the bad guys. He is definitely the result of his environment. The story is set near London. In the States, we’d call where he lives the Projects. It’s several large apartment buildings that house a lot of people who live on the margins of society. The saddest element is the kids who look up to the older gang members and aspire to be just like them. They are trained to be cruel and accept violence in their lives.
On the positive side, once the story got going I had a hard time putting down the book. The pacing builds and has some very exciting passages. I enjoyed how Tom was able access information and use his powers to help those younger and weaker than he. Yes, you have to hang up reality as you know it. This story requires you to take a lot on belief and not really question it. I think it works because the story moves fast enough that you don’t have a lot of time to think about how it doesn’t make sense and wouldn’t work. A lot of the story has all or most of the major characters in danger. I was torn between wanting Tom to take down all the gang activities in his neighborhood and wanting Tom to be safe.
This book works. But I caution parents to have a good idea what’s in it. If you are comfortable with your child reading about all the things that I warned you about, I think young adults will be engaged in the story. It maybe particularly attractive to young males who may identify with Tom. I’m very much in favor of attracting young adults to reading. If this sort of story draws in readers that’s great. But it’s not a happy view of the world or life. It does have a fairly happy ending but it’s still a very uncertain future for our heroes.
