The Way We Roll
Scott Gardner
Will lives under the bowling alley and pushes trolleys for a day-job. His life involves pumping iron at the gym so he can have a shower, and feeding off Japanese sushi. Julian eats takeaway and has a sexy girlfriend who hangs out with him in the ‘burbs when he isn’t pushing trolleys. The two boys and their worlds are distant, but their trolley-pushing pushes them together too.
The twist in this novel is that you don’t know there is a twist. I’m really not sure how long Will’s situation has been the way it is, but you get the snap-shot of when things are really changing. Will is very skittish, but cute all the same. Julian is not cute. He’s just annoying and pushy and a great friend.
This novel was laugh out loud funny. Literally. I needed to stop several times to read it out loud to my partner so that she could also appreciate the humour. That being said, the humour was of a fart / inappropriate variety, but if you can’t laugh about some of these things, you need to anyway!
I’m not sure that Julian running from the goat is a major part of the novel (as suggested by the blurb), but being a friend or family is really important. This novel moves super quickly and there’s hardly time for character development. Who cares about character development when there is a fast-acting plot?
I’d strongly recommend this novel to relutant teenage readers. In fact, I think I enjoyed it enough to give it 5 stars. It’s rare that a novel makes me laugh so hard, or need to share so much of it while I’m reading it.
