Title: Teen Dad For Dummies
Author: Amazingness23
Genre: Teen Fiction
Description: Dear Teen Fathers
My story starts when I decided to lose my virgnity to the last person I want to lose my virginity to. Out of people, it had to be my best friend's girlfriend. Being told by his girlfriend saying how I'm the father of an unwanted baby makes the situation even more extreme and hard to deal with, am I right? No worries. For all you teen dads out there, I have sucessfully been able to accomplish the responsibilities of teen father hood, in one single story. I'll give you all the tips and advice you'll need for the new additon and I'll share some experiences that'll you'll find amusing. I'll say it now, none of these experiences have anything to do with the baby, but just my survival of my last year of high school and last time of freedom. Sincerely, your teen dad, Eddie Turner
Amount I've read: First four parts
Review:
Well, this book is certainly unique. Unique plot, characters, sentence structure, writing style, you name it. The first thing that popped into my mind when I read the first page was, "This would make a great movie script." For a few reasons.
This story is very, very dialogue-centered. It seems script-like in the way that most of it is dialogue with a few "stage directions" and snippets of info. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, but it's certainly something you don't see every day.
The dialogue was realistic and I could see the characters' personalities reflected in their conversation. You can see the tension between characters Eddie and Victoria, and the friendship between Eddie and Diego. Overall I think this aspect of the story is well done.
I did have a bit of an issue with the narration, however. This story is told from the first-person perspective of Eddie, a teenage semi-dork who goes to a party for the sole purpose of getting laid. And despite his...noble...intentions, things go wrong when he ends up hooking up with his best friend's girlfriend. An potentially interesting and unique plot when told from the male's perpective, but in my opinion the narration could use a little work.
Each time a new character is introduced I feel like I'm recieving a character bio of their entire life's history and personality. Eddie feels the need to tell us every aspect of this person's character and how he feels about them. Most of it isn't relevant to the story and it breaks the flow of the chapter, especially considering that this is one of the few breaks from the dialogue that we get. Eddie always describes the characters' personalities in the narrative rather than us being shown their personalities through their words or actions.
Throughout the story, I've been having trouble figuring Eddie out. He describes himself as shy, yet when he goes to a party he has no problem talking to the girl he's had a crush on for a while and doing a dance with her that mostly involves grinding. Then he purposely gets drunk and decides to dance on a countertop with his friend without his pants on, even though he seems lucid enough to be competely sober. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound very shy to me.
At the beginning of the story I really didn't like eddie. On the very first page of the story he says (not in the dialogue, but in the first-person narration), "If some girl comes along and bothers the hell out of me, I'll hit her. Just one punch to the face and that's all it takes." Now to me, that sounded a little over-aggresive and I disliked him. But soon enough I realized that his saying that was more of a reaction to Victoryia bothering him rather than an actual personality flaw.
I don't know if these slight inconsistencies were intended by the author, but honestly I like them. It gives Eddie an edge of the unpredictable that I enjoyed in the story, not sure of what he'd do next. He may be annoyingly hard to figure out at some points, but I do prefer that over boring one-dimensional main characters. The problem with first-person stories is that if the reader doesn't like the main character, then the whole book is ruined. This story, at least in my opinion, doesn't have that problem. I really liked Eddie by the time I finished reading.
The other characters were interesting as well. Eddie describes Diego as being the typical athletic-jock-best-friend that you can find in almost any teen fiction book, but the dialogue revealed a deeper character than the popular-guy exterior. Plus he's a fun kind of drunk, which is always entertaining.
Chuck was...well, weird. Yeah, that's a good word for it. He's just plain strange. In a good way, though. I laughed my way through the whole part he was in. But it did seem like he was kind of randomly tossed into the story without any explanation. It was just kind of like POOF, and then he was there in the story.
The same thing applies to Kim, who shows up a bit later. A very appealing character who's kind, yet has a rebellious mean streak to her. But I felt that she was kind of randomly thrown into the story. From the description and beginning chapters, it sounds like Eddie's main friends are Diego and maybe even Victoria. Kim is never once mentioned until she just shows up out of the blue, yet she is described as being Eddie's favorite female friend. A little description every once in awhile would perk this story up nicely.
This is a relatively new story and the plot has just started out, so I will be curious to find out where it goes from here. Overall, I thought it was pretty decent. The narrative is quite one-dimensional for a first-person story, but the dialogue almost makes up for it. I'd recommend it to teens who don't mind a dialogue-centered story and are into the whole teen-parents idea. I promise, the way it's told puts an extremely original spin on a commonly used plot. I enjoyed reading it.
Click the external link if you feel like checking out the story.
