"I Am the Cheese" ***
by Robert Cormier
Robert Cormier is one of the nation's most challenged authors, and I mean that in a good way; "The Chocolate Wars" regularly gets some parents riled up enough to want to ban it from public and school library shelves because he writes about teenage boys as they are.
Cormier's books are sort of the equivalent of YA chick-lit for boys, a genre that needs its own catchy moniker (besides "dick-lit," which is all I can come up with on the spur of the moment). His books nicely capture the awkwardness, fears, and shame about a developing body as well as the mind that is trying to move from the oblivousness of childhood to more mature understanding. The fact that "I Am the Cheese" takes place, in part, in a mental institution underscores some of the emotional challenges of this age. There's also plenty of action.
This book didn't grab me--I'm not a teenage boy, and I don't really go in for a lot of adolescent angst--I'm one of the few people I know who disliked "Catcher in the Rye."
But Cormier does help me be a better friend to my teenage son. And, these days, teenage boys need all the friends they can get.
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