Youth in Revolt

Rating:
Summary: harry potter with las vegas in his pants
Review: Books based around teenagers are very tricky to write, but Payne does it with such grace that I had to write a review.

Youth in Revolt is about a 14 year old kid living in Oakland with a dysfunctional family. It's pretty funny but sometimes can seem unrealistic. There's one scene where he burns down Berkeley that made me really confused. There are also parts where people just randomly die... which seemed pretty besides the point.

In addition, Payne uses a lot of irony and twists taken loosely out of Shakespeare. So if you've read the required books from 9th grade and are young at heart, i think you'd enjoy this.

I must also warn you that there is an extraordinary number of crude jokes.

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest comic novels ever
Review: Do not read this book if you have a lot of other things to do in your life. It will consume you. You will feel compelled to read this and be oblivious to all other things around you.

That being said, this book is the funniest I have ever read, and I read an average of 2 books a week. Payne is a master of comedy. This book is a barrage of comic situations written as young Nick Twisp's diary.

After a visit to Ukiah, CA, where Nick meets the ravishing Sheeni Saunders, he has to be reunited withher. So, he starts plotting and manipulating those around him. This involves getting is dad fired and finding him a job in Ukiah. Then, he must leave his mother and her series of tyrannical boyfriends. All the while, Sheeni is carrying on with Trent, a boy one year older than she. Oblivious to their relationship, Nick tries eveyrthing to get back with Sheeni. All of this description is just scratching the surface of this masterpiece.

Don't be fooled by the length. This book is a very quick read. I urge you to buy it now if you enjoy laughing.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Story No Matter What Your Age
Review: For the sake of being interesting, I will review this book in the style which it was written:

Day 1: Finally started reading this book. Many years ago, a friend suggested I read it. Ever since then, the title was always stuck in my head. When I would see it in print I would think, "You know. I really should pick that book up." Eventually I did pick it up, but it ended up in my overly large "to read" pile. Finally, something made me pick it up today. After 50 pages, it seems interesting.

Day 2: I read more of the book today. I'm having trouble getting into it based on the nature of how it is written. The entire book is written in the form of journal entries. Don't get me wrong, it's easy to read. Still, I find that the short entries lend themselves to reading only a few at a time. Still, over the course of the day I read 100 pages. Certainly an interesting book.

Day 3: I read 250 pages of the book today. I can't put it down. The short journal entries have gone from being a hindrance in reading to an aid in getting rapid snapshots of how the story unfolds. The narrative transpires in small doses which leave you wanting more. As soon as I put the book down I want to pick it up again and get another dose. I cannot remember the last time I was so engrossed in a book. It's uncanny.

Day 4: Today is the final day with the book. That sounds funny, but it's true. I wish it were 1000 pages long and I could get 4 more days out of it. No, make that 2000. For the first time in a long time, I am saddened to see a book coming to a close. I don't want it to end, I enjoy it that much. Normally, I look forward to the close of one story and the beginning of a new one. Not this time. I want this story to go on forever (or a reasonable length of time). It's that enjoyable.

Day 5: I am sitting here the day after, thinking about the book. The ending was good enough, not Earth shattering. Nothing amazing could have happened to make everything right in the world again. I honestly didn't expect a lot from the ending and I would have been disappointed if he had tried to do make everything perfect. The bulk of the story ties up, which prevents it from merely hanging. Still, some questions remain, like: How did Paul know?

I wish I could pick it up and read it again. But it's too early for that. Being honest, the book wasn't philosophically deep enough for me to learn anything new if I were to reread it immediately. Still, the book was really good. Sitting down with it every day was a pleasure.

If every book were this good, I would read constantly. As it is, I read every day, but not like this. I read this book while brushing my teeth or making coffee. I'll miss this book. It was a great ride which I am sad to see end.

As a final note, I think those who give the book bad ratings are not able to stray from their usual genre of reading and accept this book for what it is. It is a well written and silly narrative about 14-year-old kids that is not really based in reality, but as a 14-year-old might see it. The fact that the story is interpreted through the voice of one of these children is lost on the people who disparage the book. Don't be swayed from reading this, as it harkens back to the silliness inherent in youth which can be appreciated at any age.

Phenomenal entertainment value. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best out there...
Review: I found this book very disturbing. Some parts where funny but all in all it wasn't what I expected. I don't think this was a very good interpritation of a teenagers life. Not all male teens are over hormonial like Nick (The Protagonist) and not all teen lives revolve around sex. Reading this book made me feel as if I was reading something illegal, it made me feel somewhat like a pedofile. It seemed as if everyother sentence contained some kind of sexual reference, as if all that was in the protagonists life was sex, which got boring after the first 28 pages. It also seemed like the only people enjoying this book in my school where mostly girls/wemon, while the other gender found it a bit disturbing. This book seems more for younger, maybe middle school, or early high school students, but not something I would recomend to older readers. There where some funny parts, but all togeather I believe it is not something I would recomend/ buy.

Rating:
Summary: Maybe it should have been about pigeons?
Review: I loved Frisco Pigeon Mambo, but was not a fan of this book. I found the characters to be annoying and the entire book to be like a Porky's movie with bigger words. There was not one redeeming character in this book. Not that I enjoy a fairytale romance, but would a hint of realism hurt?
At times ridiculous, even more often pretentious, this book did its job by giving me something to read for a week. I seemed too often to wish I could reach into this book and slap the characters silly.
Maybe this means that C.D. Payne worked some magic that I am not getting, but I am not recommending this book to the people to whom I recommended Frisco Pigeon Mambo. Comparitively, this book was slow, annoying and typical.


Rating:
Summary: As pretensious as it's characters.
Review: I would like to see a book about intellectual teenagers written by someone who appears to have actually met one. I've never heard any teenager, intellectuals or not, use the word "draconian" this many times. To characterize the love interest, Sheeni, as an intellectual, the author has her name-dropping esoteric foreign films, existentialist philosophers, and includes an incredible interest in the French. All this is fine, but he stops there. The dialogue is inane (is their constant use of the word "darling" supposed to be ironic on their part, or are they just poorly written?), all of the "intellectuals" use ridiculously big words when smaller ones would be just as intelligent and often more appropriate, and Sheeni talks about her obsession with French men like a teenybopper talks about pop stars. The jerky ex-boyfriend, Trent, who the main character, Nick, regards as a totally pretentious jerk (hypocritically enough), writes poetry so ridiculously bad (and not even representative of bad teenage pseudo-intellectual poetry) that it is unrealistic that the supposedly genius and worldly Sheeni would ever buy into it. Of course, this is required for the reader to accept it when he gets dumped without a second thought. The author attempts to garner sympathy for Nick, who is the least realistic character, by giving him a bad home life and idiot parents. However, for someone who can't afford to buy clothes for the coming school year, he sure is a snob. When transferred from his private school to a public one, he whines mercilessly about what an indignity it is and how he has been robbed of an education. If the author is commenting on pretentious snobby teenagers (which seems unlikely), he does well, but it gets old very, very quickly. You get the feeling that C.D. Payne believes his characters to be at least intellectually superior to the majority of people their age, but dropping esoteric references and making an incredibly liberal use of the thesaurus doesn't make them smart, or even poignant.

Rating:
Summary: Revisiting the toughest time in anyone's life
Review: In C.D. Payne's novel Youth in Revolt, I found myself revisiting a time in my life which was hell-- age 14. Revisiting the awkwardness, the angst, and the raging hormones is not necessarily something I would do willingly, but nonetheless Payne often made me laugh about it. While I wouldn't call it the funniest book I've ever read, there were a few paragraphs that were so wonderfully worded I had to read them over five or six times (each time laughing harder). While comedy laces the narrative together, the best part of the book comes in Payne's ability to make us relate to Nick. It's hard to remember just how thoughtful and mature we were at age 14, and Payne pulls all those repressed memories back up to the surface. It's as though you are looking at yourself today, and realizing how that time sent you on the path to your current self.

Along the way, Payne introduces a series of characters that, for better or for worse, fail to move beyond caricatures. This is the result of the entire book coming in diary form, whereby you only get a sense of the characters by viewing them through Nick's biased eyes. In the long run, the heart of the book's humor comes from this viewpoint. From the oafish truck-driver Wally Rumpkin to the dazzling Indian goddess Apurva Joshi, the supporting characters come alive through Nick's insightful observations of them. Some characters are pure genius. Lance Walcott, the evil cop turned stepdad, is a figure everyone loves to hate, and I found myself eagerly awaiting for Nick to knock him over with one of his brilliant schemes. In fact, these are the most engaging portions of the book, in which Nick has been slighted and he plots witty revenge-- you only wish you had his talent to make it so sweet and yet perfectly cover your tracks as he does.

Occassionally, the book falls into lulls, in which characters become the underbelly of humanity (Nick's dad, Dwayne, Bruno, and even Nick). These visits with the grotesque features of humanity are the book's only failed attempts at humor. I found myself skipping pages here and there, either because the plot was on a treadmill, or the narrative was getting repetitively boring. Except for these portions, this would have been a four star book.

Rating:
Summary: "Nick, how did you get to be so warped?"
Review: Nick Twisp is the 14-year-old protagonist who disguises, schemes, and manipulates his way through this amazingly funny novel. When the story begins, Nick is living with his divorced mother in Oakland, but when his mother's sleazy boyfriend wants to hide from some vengeful sailors, they hurriedly depart for a week's holiday to a dumpy trailer park in Ukiah. It's here that Nick meets the love of his life, the teen queen of his erotic dreams, Sheeni Saunders. Unfortunately, the course of true love never runs smoothly, and Nick and Sheeni are separated when Nick returns home. From this moment on, Nick's obsession and sole goal in life is to be reconciled with Sheeni, and there are many, many obstacles in his way--including, but not limited to Nick's delinquent father, Nick's love-stricken mother, school officials, various teenage Lotharios, and the FBI.

Nick Twisp is a twisted, warped, deviant Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn's scrapes were largely innocent fun. Twisp is the Huckleberry Finn of the 20th century. Stuck in the company of unsatisfied, philandering, dysfunctional adults, he twists their foibles and paranoia to his ultimate aim. Throughout the novel, Nick creates alternate egos that aid and abet him in creating the havoc he wreaks upon society. Nick refers to these alter egos in the third person, and they become additional characters, emerging to help scheme whenever he needs them. Nick remains unruffled while the world around him reverberates from his nihilistic plans, and the results of Nick's schemes escalate as each plan backfires. No 14 year-old could possibly think or act as Nick does, but it simply doesn't matter. He provides us with a wild roller-coaster ride of hilarity, and the plot gets more and more bizarre as the page numbers mount. Author Payne's plasticine plot weaves in amusing new characters effortlessly and smoothly--there's Hurlburt, the budgie from Beyond, Mrs. Ulansky, the former film star who claims that several Hollywood leading men were all 'practically midgets", Mr. Ferguson, the geriatric militant, and Dwayne, the [...] voyeur. "Youth in Revolt" is the first C.D. Payne novel I've read, and it won't be the last--displacedhuman

Rating:
Summary: Funny, but it gets old...
Review: Overall, a very quick and entertaining read--comes complete with 4 stars and a shiny recommendation. Nick Twisp is the 14-year-old protagonist (I've come to question the latter part of that description) in a book that is a slightly affected mixture of _On_the_Road_ and _Huckleberry_Finn_, written by Judy Blume while in the throes of a drug- and thesaurus-enduced haze. One sometimes gets the feeling the author is careening from one misadventure to the next, each more unbelievable than the last. Hence, suspend any disbelief and need-for-the-literal and you will find _Youth_In_Revolt_ to be highly enjoyable and rewarding.

Rating:
Summary: A comic book without pictures
Review: There is no movie, television show, comic, or book that even compares with the hilarity of this novel. Maybe this book isn't the most thought provoking, or the most philosophical, but it is (by far) the funniest.

Actually three seperate novels, this trilogy follows Nick Twisp, you not-so-average boy, with your not-so-average life. You see, each and every one of Nick's actions are driven by his unsatiable hunger for the charming, beautiful, and intellectual Sheeni Saunders. He wrecks car, gets his father fired, runs away from home, and dresses as a girl...all to win the heart of his love. But she's not about to let him win that easily.

This novel will never cease to keep you completely engrossed.