Fly by Alison Hughes
I did think of starting this review with just the words "believe the hype", but as I write I'm a very early adopter of this must-read, and there are not many people joining me in lauding it yet. And anyway the word "hype" contains as much connection to reality as "glamour". "Glamour" is the false, the pretence that might make you look beautiful, and not the real thing. "Hype" is not the real thing, either – connections to "hyperbole" and so on show it to be similarly fake. And with this book, and this main character, the fact people don't see the reality beneath the surface is key.
| Fly by Alison Hughes | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: In which a young lad with palsy tries to navigate the school life that drains all the well-meaning from him, leaving him to turn to an unlikely source to back up his thoughts of honour and chivalry. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 220 | Date: October 2022 |
| Publisher: Kids Can Press | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1525305832 | |
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So, erm, "believe the reality".
This is a very impressive read, is the reality, as it does a lot of what mainstream teen and tween fiction still struggles with. Its focus is courtesy the first person narration from Fly, a secondary school lad with cerebral palsy, a down-on-her-luck single mom nearing retirement from being a cleaner, a carer while at school, and a bundle of assumptions people lay on him. First they assume that with a broken body comes a broken mind, then they decide he's a maths savant – they even believe they can get away with calling him Fly, which isn't his real name, but everybody just uses it.
So Felix, not Fly, has a lot to be bitter about. But having his back, steering him through all the hours when he can't be bothered to look up and see pity, inanity and everyone's constant struggle to avoid the alleged struggle of talking to him, is "Don Quixote", the hefty and ancient volume about chivalry, dubious assumptions and justice. This is yet one more unexpected layer on the whole piece, and who knows – people may well turn to more than the exam notes to check it out as a result.
The other distinctive thing to talk about is that this is free verse – regularly throwing in rhymes, and so on, but matching concrete verse in the way it weaves its very short lines across the page and back with a near-rapping, spoken-word style. This is both eye-opening, very successfully done, and very annoyingly chopped up into chapters every couple of pages. How I wish I'd just stopped with the poem/chapter titles much earlier, for the flow is superlative from one to the next.
So, we get a presentation that is bound to feel unique to many (and in a way that makes the 200pp flash by like few others); we get a non-mainstream character narrating, and from my inexperienced ear never causing any jar or doubt to his authenticity; and in bringing something so, so classical to the contemporary teen novel we get something both very literate and very readable. No I don't know all the current canon, the benchmark books for this audience, but I do know what I feel about this, which is that this has what it takes to enter that canon. I will question the way some things are dropped, such as the flying dream, and I remain annoyed it got chopped up, but all the same it's a lot more than a four star read.
I am au fait with the canon enough to file this close to Wonder by R J Palacio.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Fly by Alison Hughes at Amazon.com.
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