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"About A Boy" by Nick Hornby /
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Some of my friends read this book for school and so one of them recommended it to me. I started in the summer vacations and I finished reading after a week.
Set in London, the story is equally that of Will, an attractive, single, 36 year-old man and Marcus, an odd-looking, 12 year-old boy. Hornby gives equal weight to Marcus and Will. The chapters are written rotatory in the views of Marcus and Will so you can see clearly differences and other opinions, that's a very good method to learn very quickly something about the characters.
Will is 36 years old and he has never worked all life! Thanks his father who wrote a famous Christmas-song Will gets a lot of money by doing nothing. So, Will is still a single and he has an ordinate day which is divided in units, so Will describes the ordinary day himself: Going to hairdresser - 2 units, watching TV - 2 units, going out in the evenings - 2 units, eating - 2 units, listening to Nirvana - 2 units and looking after girls - 4 units. So, by the way, Will is still an attractive single, but he doesn't really want to have a girlfriend, he just wants to have some fun. A relation to a woman is only hassle and those things with emotions. Anything which is involved with emotions is not the real thing for him. But where to find a woman with who Will can have some independent sex? He thought of a big deal when he found that group of single-parents. There would be a lot of women who would fall in love with him and who want to have some fun with him. To get into this group of single-parents, Will invented Ned, a two years old son and very soon he got to know Suzie, of course a single mother. There is only one problem; Suzie wanted to see Ned all the time.
Enter Marcus. He has just moved to London with his mother, Fiona. Fiona is a hippy; her fashion is still this of 1968, she listens to songs from Bob Marley and Joni Mitchell, she is of course a vegetarian. This is the reason that Marcus doesn\'t know anything about the latest music groups, sports teams, latest fashions, or for that matter, current slang. He dresses oddly, but doesn\'t know it. At school he has some problems with that because other kids don't want to hang around with him and they laugh at him.
What is worse, he took everything literally. He had no sense of irony or sarcasm and so he often did not understand if adults make jokes or not. However, he couldn\'t talk to his mother about it because she spent much of her time with crying. He knew his life is \"crap\", but he didn\'t know why.
Both Marcus and Will were cut off from normal relationships, but for totally different reasons; Will because he didn\'t want to get involved in emotional and messy relationships, and Marcus because he doesn\'t know how to relate to people like a regular twelve year old.
Will\'s and Marcus\'s lives collided when Suzie, who was a friend of Fiona, agreed to take Marcus on a picnic with Will and her daughter. When they returned from the picnic, they discovered that Fiona had attempted suicide. From this point on, Will was dragged into Marcus\'s life.
Marcus thought that Will could "fix" things in his life and got together with his mum. But Will wasn't even a bit interested in an old, shabby hippie. And Will also didn't want anything to do with Marcus because Will thought he had to come around with his life himself.
Well, how the story will go on with Marcus, Will, Fiona and Suzie you have to read yourself because it's really exciting and amusing.
I liked reading that book very much. It's really funny to see how different people can be. Will and Marcus, they are totally different personalities but anyway they will become friends. There are a lot of humorous situations and that's great. I can recommend this book to you although it's not new edited and everybody knows the story by the film. I think the film is not as good as the book because in the book there are much more details.
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