Spud
By John van der Ruit
Published by Penguin
ISBN 978 0 141 32356 5
Tagline: Manic parents, crazy teachers & bizarre friends star in hilarious rites of passage book.
What's it about?
It's 1990 and things are changing rapidly in South Africa. The country's president has legalised the once banned African National Congress Party and the black political leader, Nelson Mandela has been released from prison. Saddled with a pair of dysfunctional parents and a set of very odd friends, young teen Spud Milton is struggling with the problems of growing up as well as all the changes going on around him. But using his wits, Spud manages to keep his head above water even when his parents send him to a boarding school where the teachers are a very eccentric lot and chaos rules over education. SPUD chronicles the often laugh-out-loud life and times of one confused adolescent. Spud's experiences at boarding school are wild and hectic, but he manages to keep his head by using his wits whilst everyone around him is losing theirs.
Is it any good?
If you enjoy a well written novel packed with laughs (some of them a bit rude!), you will enjoy meeting SPUD. It's a long book coming in at three hundred and ninety pages, and at times it's a dense read, but the central character is so appealing that you certainly miss him when it's all over. Van de Ruit works hard to make sure his novel is much more than a parade of whacky characters and a string of disjointed acts of mayhem. The whole book is held together by the well-rounded personality of Spud himself. Sometimes confused, sometimes at odds with the chaos around him, sometimes desperate, Spud Milton is an excellent creation. Here is a school novel for young teen boys or for anyone else brave enough to want to know what makes thirteen and fourteen year old boys tick. SPUD is a school-based novel with an hilarious difference.
