On Amy's suggestion, I acquired Kelly Braffit's Josie and Jack from the library today. I finished it the same day, and with time left over in the day for baking pistachio bread, swearing endlessly at Netgear and SBC, and taking a trip to the beach. Which is to say, it is not a long book, and because it is fun, it flies by.

Well, it is fun if your idea of a fun book is an excess of drugs, theft, quasi-interest and deeply confused childhood: something like Nabokov's Ada but twice as readable and less than one tenth as sexy.

Anyway, I quibble with Amy's earlier post. She mysteriously refers to Josie and Jack as children of privilege: their father is a crazy math/physics professor at a 4th-tier regional college who home-schools his children in a decaying old house dozens of miles from Pittsburgh. There is no evidence that the family has any money (and quite a bit of evidence that they have little), and the only "privilege" that the title Js seem to enjoy is being able to smoke mediocre marijuana all day rather than attend school. This is mere license.

Also, Amy complains that sometimes real-world consequences intrude on the main characters, but sometimes they get off scot-free. It is hard to go into specifics without spoiling the whole book, but it seems to me that there's a method to the madness. Consequences that involve, say, law-enforcement authorities, pretty much never happen, while consequences that involve, say, biology, are pretty darn inexorable. Which is pretty much the same message that Josie and Jack's crazy father was trying to drill into them when they were growing up.

[50 Book Challenge]