What do You think about Rats Saw God (2007)?
4.25 Stars. Whether you're an old hag like me who grew up watching 90210 or you're a young'in "liking" anything to do with TFiOS, this is one to add to your "to read" list. Steve is a pot-head who is about to fail his senior year. If he can complete a supplemental writing assignment for English, he'll pass. The only limitation to the assignment - write about something he knows. After a severe case of writer's block, Steve chooses to write the history of his high school years. He tells how he has survived his parents' divorce, experienced first love and first loss and went from an honor student to a burnout. This was recommended to me by the library and made pretty clear I should love it because of my age/reading preferences/the 90210 connection, but this was so much deeper/just flat out BETTER than shows like that. It was a superfast read and proved (yet again) that I would choose a PG-13 love story over "Grey" any day of the week.
—Kelly (and the Book Boar)
Rob's debut novel seems to get all the attention; it's the one teachers will use in their classes if they do that sort of thing. And it's definitely a good book. It follows two timestreams: Steve York's senior year in San Diego, and his sophomore and junior years in Houston, when his life went horribly, terribly wrong. We get his first-person narration of the present; the story of Houston is his English project.It took me fifty to eighty pages to really get into it, honestly. I was having trouble imagining these words coming out a seventeen-year-old boy's brain. And the narrative drive was...slow. It's carried along by the strength of the prose, whether or not something actually interesting is happening.Another strength is best described by Chris Lynch, who gets a quote on the back of the book: "Rats Saw God does something special—it treats teenagers as if their lives are complex and interesting....Thomas brings to the party one more thing that YA lit can never have enough of: attitude." I never read a lot of YA lit, so I don't really know how much more complex and interesting Rob's characters are than the norm, but he does do a good job of making the characters people. Which is necessary since the basic story is nothing extraordinary, even though it has its quirks here and there. It's a kid in high school, doing high school things. So in that respect, I was a little disappointed and didn't see what all the hoopla was about. It was competently done, and I was satisfied with the way things ended up and were resolved, for the most part. One thing I really liked was how Steve would make throwaway references to things people had said to him in the past, and then later on, as we read about the past, we get the context of the scene. The narrative was pretty tightly held together, and I appreciated that.
—Sunil
4.5.Steve, despite being a National Merit Scholar, is in danger of not earning the last English credit he needs to graduate senior year. But his counselor makes him an offer: write his story. Explain what's going on. Get to the truth. After initial hesitance, Steve starts to write.This is an older book (1996!) but it's so relevant and still speaks to the teen experience today. Steve has an authentic and believable male voice and one which reminded me of so many of the boys I used to work with. Everything that's been bothering Steve and causing him to quit caring about school is testament to that time when you realize you're not a product of other people but in fact, you're an independent, thinking, feeling person. This is the quintessential bildungsroman, in that as readers we get to see Steve "come of age" right before us in more than one way. We get him at the point where it seems he can't be redeemed, but through the essay he writes, we watch as he has his huge growth and experiences his moments of clarity. We watch as he's feeling okay about his lot in life in Houston, but then as he navigates the tricky territory of making and keeping friends of his own, of falling in love and experiencing intimacy with a girl, of having his heart trampled on by that self-same girl, of determining what his parents are to him, of having adults just plain let him down or give up on him completely. As he starts figuring these things out, you can't help but love him just a little bit more and hope nothing but the best for him. Even if Steve is so far removed from his feelings and his experiences (he chooses to get high and not do work for a reason), we know it's because he's working through so much alone. But it's that essay and that reaching out from his counselor -- the first adult to actually care about him and not give up on him in years -- that helps him through. At least, that's what we're led to believe because that's how Steve feels; but as the back story develops and the current story progresses, we learn that there were many more allies in Steven's life than he was aware of. But this is precisely the teen mentality (and hell, it's the human mentality, isn't it?). It all comes to a head when Steven learns the truth about his parents, about his father and mother's divorce, about how, despite feeling like his father has been worthless, he's actually just been reading and treating Steve the way he felt like Steve needed and wanted to be read and treated.There are drugs and there is sex in this book. I was actually a little surprised how detailed the sex scenes were, but (view spoiler)[ they were tasteful and important to who Steve was and why his heart was so shattered over Dub. I'd go as far as to say maybe Thomas's exploration of losing one's virginity is one of the most honest and candid I've read. I was simultaneously happy for and sad for the characters at the same time, in the same way that Steve was happy and sad about it. (hide spoiler)]
—Kelly
