My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This coming of age story promised an interesting take on the usual background influences that often produce the final adult who emerges from a ‘human pupa’, but I found most of the book tedious to read. The amount of detail that we are given through the voices of Jackson, his mother, Annalise, and his girlfriend, Leah, was surplus to requirements for me. This may have been due to the fact that it is so obviously a novel aimed at young adults and I am certainly not that. As a grandfather I thought most of the teen angst experienced as a result of parental influence or ‘young love’ somewhat obvious, although most of the language and idiomatic expressions were novel to me, and occasionally surprising – even shocking! I felt there was often a loss of atmosphere, when a sense of time and place, sights, sounds and smells could have conveyed feelings better. The settings of the 1970s and 80s did not always ring true; the mention of a couple of bands was not enough.
The style of narrative with each of the three protagonists telling the tale from their own point of view would have been less confusing if they had each done it through their own chapter, but it often occurred within the same chapter, utilising a change of font to distinguish a different character speaking. This felt clumsy and unnecessary. Having got all the negative points out of the way there are a lot of positive things to talk about in Finding Jackson. The main characters are strong and well-written with plenty of believable dialogue, particularly between parents and their offspring. The rock-an’-roll attitude around Jackson and Ace, his father, contrasted well with that of Leah and her ambitious middle-class parents, even though it became a little predictable at times. I think it was this that had me rooting for the couple to the end. Fortunately there were emotional moments that had me empathising with them and made me keep turning the pages.
Overall, for me, the book could have been about a third shorter but I suspect that it has plenty of appeal for the YA readers it is aimed at, and will go down well with them.
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