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| This image stolen from Wikipedia. (Warning: Wikipedia plot summary contains major spoilers. You have been warned.) |
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So, today I finished reading Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick. I read it because I enjoyed Philbrick's other book, The Last Book in the Universe so much. I didn't enjoy this book as much as I did that one, though, probably because The Last Book in the Universe is sci-fi (dystopia, even - I adore dystopias), and this one is not. I also felt like this one was perhaps a bit young for me, even though the MC is my age.
The book is about a boy named Max, who's very large and not extremely intelligent. He makes friends with a boy called Freak, who's very short and very smart indeed. They team up and become Freak the Mighty.
I really did enjoy this book. It was fun and original, and the style was very realistic for the kind of character who was doing the narrating. I'm not going to spoil anything, but I will say that the ending was absolutely perfect, and incredibly sad. I loved the character of Max.
I liked Freak, too, but he felt kind of unrealistic, a problem that I often have with "genius" teenagers in fiction. They tend to know too much about every conceivable topic, and to always talk using extremely sesquipedalian words. (Even Artemis Fowl bothers me, sometimes, in his case because he doesn't ever act like a real person would in a given situation - witness the bit at the beginning of The Lost Colony when he thinks about girls.)
This is the fifty-third book I've read this year.