By Drew Ferguson
[Kensington Books, 2008. 258 pages. $15.00 paperback]
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan

If a book can make you squirm, it’s likely that you’ve been pinned. This coming-of-underage first novel takes the form of a journal written to practice for a college admission essay. However, self-described “walking hard-on” Charles Stewart II can’t control himself and spews his teenage anxiety and corrosive contempt into every line, and at an impressive array of unsuspecting targets: the old, the young, the dumb, the clever, successes and failures, all skewered in hyphenated hyperbole. The three months chronicled encompass the start of his senior year in a Crystal Lake high school, his father’s States Attorney election campaign, his parents’ impending break-up, and above all the arrival of a heart-throbbing soul-mate. The urbane Rob Hunt is Charlie’s ideal, although not without his own baggage, including a dying mother whose mysterious situation is about the only thing in the book not written in hormone.

Ferguson’s grasp of teen-speak is convincing and hence annoying; there are at least two dozen euphemisms for you know what (genital origami, anyone?), and so much inverted purple prose that it leaves you wishing for just one entendre that’s single. There is a word for this type of material (hint: rhymes with corn), but of course the book has more to offer.

Charlie goes to such lengths to paint himself a nerd that it cools the steam off what might otherwise be overly explicit. At least some of the action takes place on the soccer field, and the narration is brisk. What happens above the belt mostly concerns Charlie’s resentment at being in his father’s shadow, and his saner, steadier relationships with his mother and a childhood friend. He comes through everything, including getting his bell rung on and off the field, with elevated maturity and undiminished, often-hilarious spasms of sarcasm, and the odd flash of insight. “Denial—it’s the glue barely holding millions of American families together.”

Overall, this book, which has a study guide, a website, and a trailer, is quite ambitious and hugely entertaining. If you find yourself wanting to slap this kid and say, “Get a grip on yourself…wait, let me rephrase that,” the odds are, you’re pinned.

Drew Ferguson earned an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago in 1995. His work has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly, The James White Review, Hair Trigger, The Great Lawn, and other publications.