Review: Wierdly funny and very timely
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2014
I loved The Fracking King. However, I must caveat that by saying that I am a Scrabble fanatic, I love bizarrely funny, bold satire, and I am a died-in the wool environmentalist who knew a lot about fracking and its devastating environmental effects before I read the book. I think you need a sort of warped sense of humor to truly enjoy this book. If you are unable to suspend disbelief and just go with the flow of this unusal story, this book will not appeal to you.The two parallel stories, one of Winston Crwth, the Scrabble savant/misfit and the discovery of the serious fracking that is going on in Pennsylvania might sound ludicrous, but they ring very true. Win is a very believable character, sent to several private schools with the best intentions of his father, but none of these schools are as advertised. The Hale Academy, which is the school he attends in the book, is the last of the three and undoubtedly the most bizarre. An all-boys school, with one girl for whom an exception is made, makes its students attend classes six days a week, with each teacher more "unusual" than the next. Win is handicapped by his Scrabble addiction - having played since he was about four years old, and, winning several competitions, he is almost unable to read or write a proper English sentence because his mind is so used to reading words horizontally or vertically, but not in sentence form. The quest to uncover the mercenary fracking villains, Dark Oil and Gas, is both hysterical and sadly serious. This is a wild, rollicking tale that this middle aged woman enjoyed immensely. If I liked it, I cannot imagine a middle school reader who would not be enchanted by it.I won this book from NetGalley in exchange for a review.