Johnny Hazzard »

Johnny Hazzard's an American boy living in London for the summer. He's not used to being a foreigner, and even less used to fending for himself. Then he meets an older girl named January and suddenly his quest for experience is taking some unexpected turns. This is a novel about growing up American, growing up in the world, and growing up in the face of love. Eddie de Oliveira writes with vim, vigor, and verve about coming of age in our very uncertain, complicated age.

Patrick Jones - VOYA

Have you ever been walking in the airport near someone on a cell phone who is busy commenting on his life? I got off the plane. I'm walking in the terminal. I just passed the McDonalds. That is the feeling right from the start as de Oliveira describes in detail the sights, sounds, and tastes of Johnny Hazzard's trip from his mother's home in Austin, Texas, to his father's apartment in London, England. But once Johnny gets to London, it becomes a more engaging tale of a skateboarding Yank abroad. Johnny is fifteen, ready to reject childhood, but not quite sure of the ways of the adult world-girls in particular. Soon enough, he loses his heart and virginity to an English girl, January, who is three years older than he. The romance is well told, the sex scenes well done, and the whirl of confusion in Johnny's love-turned head spot on. The story, however, loses steam midway once Johnny leaves England for an extended vacation, with visits to the gravesites of World War I soldiers and too much information about Belgium's history. So readers get Johnny's political coming-of-age as well-he learns that war is bad. The pacing is so strange; in one chapter, January is performing oral sex on Johnny in an open field in England, whereas a few chapters later, Johnny is walking over the battlefields of the war-to-end-all-wars. This fun, funny, and funky coming-of-age story gets bogged down in details and distractions that may limit its appeal. VOYA CODES: 3Q 3P S (Readable without serious defects; Will appeal with pushing; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2005, Push/Scholastic, 335p., Ages 15 to 18.