Review: Being Black 'N Chicken, & Chips by Matt Okine

Australian comedian Matt Okine leverages on his real life experiences to create a novel about a young man who is just trying to grow up and fit in, all while his mum is dying of cancer.

The year is 1998 and Mike has just started high school in a city called Brindlewood that shares more than a passing resemblance to Brisbane. Mike's mum is white and something of a social justice crusader (the good kind,) and his dad is black, African and works as a school dentist. (Basically, he travels around in a fully equipped van doing school visits. Mike finds this slightly embarrassing.) What Mike wants more than anything is to fit in, for his crush to like him and to take part in a school sports tournament. Unfortunately life has other plans. His Mum has cancer. Mike doesn't want people to know, or to feel sorry for him. But he does want to get things right and to make his mum proud, but the reality is, he's just a kid, some things are out of his control, and other things he doesn't get quite right. And endings aren't always happy.

This was an entertaining enough read, about a kid who is struggling not only under the weight of being a kid, but under the weight of a whole lot of other problems that he solves in a way that only a teenager can. It's a great book to pass on to a teenage boy, though it also has a level of depth that means that it can be enjoyed by adult readers. (Note: the original version of this novel was intended for adults. My version is a teen edition, which has cut down on some of the swearing and dick jokes.) My only real complaint about this one was that it seemed strange to fictionalise such a well known city as Brisbane, but I suppose the author had a good reason for doing so.

A great read for teens, especially boys.

Recommended.

This book counts toward my goal for the Aussie Author Reading Challenge 2021.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more

Who Else Writes Like V.C. Andrews?

Image
Are there any other authors out there who write similar novels to V.C. Andrews? This is a question I see asked frequently in excellent fan run V.C. Andrews Facebook groups like Attic Secrets and The Dolls Club. In times gone by, The Complete V.C. Andrews webpage (which is no more, but the best bits are archived by Lorraine at the Attic Secrets blog,) had a comprehensive list. Today, I thought I would put forward a few of my own thoughts and recommendations. (Note: This will focus mainly on the series and novels written by the actual V.C. Andrews and not ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, who has a distinctive writing style of his own.) The Classics This is probably the best place to start, as it is likely that some of these novels influenced V.C. Andrews herself. Andrews was a fan of Charles Dickens, mentioning the author in the prologue of her most famous novel Flowers in the Attic. I have yet to read all of Dickens novels (I've read about half,) but I can feel a slight V.C. Andrews vi
Read more