Review: School can be a pain when you're a witch...a BOY witch.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 8, 2014
This is my third journey into the unbelievably credible world of teen angst created by Stuart R. West for his boy witch Tex in TEX AND THE GOD SQUAD.Who among us remembers the incessant cauldron of our teen years...HIGH SCHOOL...with <gulp> fondness? Very few...not even those who acted like they owned the world and all us drones living in it...You remember them...the Captain of the Football Team...the snotty Head Cheerleader...the too gorgeous and popular President of the Student Council, copping feels every time he got within a foot of you?If we'd all possessed a magic mirror, like the one on Romper Room, and could look into the "hidden" realities of every student walking those smelly, hallowed halls with us, we'd see traumas tamped down beneath the vigorously projected veneers of the flippant cruelty they tenaciously flung at us.Stuart R. West has created a trilogy so ripe in unveiling, in startling details, events I am often cringing over as I am swamped with memories of my own attempts to make it through school without calling unwarranted attention to my nerdy self.Tex has more challenges than anyone twice his age should have to endure. His mother is dead...suddenly...and so unfairly. His father has MS and even though he unselfishly tells his son to move on with his life, Tex cannot avoid the cruelty of this advancing disease, and the many ways he, not his father, must take on the mantle of adulthood, like it or not.I didn't have a close family member with MS, but in Junior High, my favorite Science Teacher, Mr. Sexton, was diagnosed with it. Over the next five years I watched this delightful teacher, and adored father go from a strapping, tall powerhouse, to a wheel bound skeleton of his former self. It hurt as one of his former students, to watch him disintegrating for my eyes. I cannot imagine what it had to have done to the children he could no longer toss a ball with, or escort his daughter to the Father/Daughter Spring Dance.Until Stuart R. West brought it to vivid life through his Tex series, I had no clue. You've a powerful voice Mr. West!