The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Barry Lyga, 2006)Fanboy is a fifteen year old kid with one friend to his name, who's unhappily living with his pregnant mother and stepfather following his parents' divorce, is alternately bullied and ignored at school, and is obsessed with/writing comic books. Excuse me--graphic novels. Goth Girl is the fellow outcast who befriends him. The teenage alienation rings really true here. Nothing's exaggerated and the characters seem three-dimensional. It wasn't predictable and kept me interested the whole way through. So many YA titles seem to fall apart at the end. So I liked it.
The only problem I had with the book is that I kept comparing it to Hard Love, which features an angsty kid dealing with divorced parents, who has only one friend, and meets a cool and mysterious girl, and is obsessed with/writing zines. And as Hard Love is one of my all-time favorite books EVER, Fanboy and Goth Girl suffer from my comparison.
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