May Cause Irritation (The World of Norm) by Jonathan Meres
| May Cause Irritation (The World of Norm) by Jonathan Meres | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A second book in this series for the nine-to-twelve year old lads amongst us gives us just what we'd expect, in story and quality. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: January 2012 |
| Publisher: Orchard | |
| ISBN: 9781408313046 | |
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There's no need, it seems, to point out how unfair the world is to you when you're a twelve year old lad. Norm certainly knows that already - despite the lavatorial accidents in book one, his younger brothers are going to be bought a dog, the ultra-annoying perfect cousins are overloaded with opportunity and spanking new mobile phones, and the girl next door has just posted a photo of him, naked, on Facebook. Such causes for desperation require a very desperate fightback, and that's what Norm is going to give us...
I'm very happy to look back on my review of the first book in this series to see me say it's one to watch, for there is absolutely no dip in quality here. The story is built up brilliantly; despite the pages being very sparsely worded to suit the target audience of irregular readers, there is a richness to detail and the entry into the scenario of a lot of different elements to build up to a peak shows this is a nicely crafted tale of comeuppance.
Once again we're so completely in Norm's world - it's like only he and the narrator call him Norm, to practically everyone else he's Norman - you can easily feel you're reading a first-person narrative. Once again there's a sort of distinctly British attitude to the narration - with doughnut the biggest insult, and flipping the greatest swear-word. Once again the pages are suitably embellished with quirky, simple line cartoons to break the page and animate the reader's eye further.
If anything holds this back it's given less by Meres and more by my more mature, adult sensibilities - that of seeing the ending as a little rushed, and the story leaving little change in the world of Norm - possibly hinting at further volumes being a little slight and not featuring much progression.
But for the target audience, Norm's is an immersive world, and one certainly with a lot of humour, truth and enjoyability. Norm might be wrong about the fairness of his lot, but I wasn't wrong about the series.
Both volumes so far of this series have advertised Dark Lord: The Teenage Years by Jamie Thomson at the back - it's a good job we liked it, then.
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You can read more book reviews or buy May Cause Irritation (The World of Norm) by Jonathan Meres at Amazon.com.
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