Review: Special Nobody
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 26, 2013
[Disclaimer: This book was a gift]Jason L'Estrange has tumbled down the stairs of a seedy nightclub. He wakes up in a hospital with a broken leg, some broken ribs and no memory of what happened. What follows is a trip back through the streets of Dublin and into his past, the narrative beginning with his mother's insistence that the word 'bastard' actually means 'special' and unfolding effortlessly from there.Brendan Spratt tells a story that is both fascinating and eerily familiar. The odds are against Jason from the very beginning. He's poor, he has no father and his mother is an alcoholic. He's bullied for being different. Despite his few triumphs and a healthy sprinkling of humor, we all know where the story is going because eventually, it will bring him to the hospital. What is so poignant about the events leading up to this is the inevitability of each step that is taken. The lengths to which any human being will go to gain acceptance, to retain friends, to not be alone in the world. It's tempting to blame Jason's mother, his friends, and a million other factors, but the author cleverly steers us away from the black and white answers. In the end, the blame is irrelevant anyway.I can honestly say that I enjoyed this, even when the subject struck a little too close to home. Jason's life will make you laugh and cry at the same time. The plot is captivating and well laid out, the supporting characters are excellent (even though you might want to smack some of them) and the ending is worth all the trouble leading up to it. I would not be in the least surprised if this eventually resulted in a movie.Now, there are a couple of things that prevented this from being a five star book.There was some decidedly odd sentence formation going on. It was a small problem because it didn't hinder the story, but it took me a while to used to it.The bigger problem was the structure. As much as it frustrates some readers to jump back and forth between the past and present, I've always found the complexity of such writing system to be fascinating. The flashback narrative can be powerful when done right, and in this novel, it's critical to the way the story develops. Only in the last quarter of the book does this structure start to crumble. The jumps are more frequent and unexpected, making it easy for a reader to lose his place in the story. There was a couple of times at the end of the book that I had the 'Where are we now?' moment, having to actually pause in between the paragraphs to figure it out. It only took me a few seconds to orient myself, but the result was an interruption in the flow of the narrative just when it was reaching its climax.Overall, a very good debut novel. I'm curious to find out what else this author has in store.