A book that I loved just as much as everybody said I would; a pleasant surprise. :-)

This book so perfectly describes what it is like to be fourteen and male in a public high school.

I thought that this was a fairly excellent book. The author captured the tone of any smart teenager stuck in an American high school, with it being just dry, ironic and sarcastic enough to be entertaining; it’s balanced by the simple, every-day-variety weirdo parents and the protagonist’s honest, human reactions that keep him from being a hollow, clever asshole.

I loved the way music was so prominently and cleverly written into the plot, helping to establish the character and personality of the protagonist while being funny as hell. (Not everything one did as a teenager had a point or end goal: he’s not in a Rockstar Supernova reality show.)

I also don’t understand the criticism of the protag’s choice of girls. That was the point: how many teenage boys know enough to instinctively go for the smart, funny, cool girl in French class? They’re selfish, inexperienced, clumsy and horny. (I think people have become too used to novels/movies where the hero always makes the right decision in the end after overcoming the inevitable character flaw, “growing” as a person…sort of EXACTLY the point made in the novel. Did anyone read it…?)

Basically Portman captured enough of the reality of a kind teenage life to keep you engaged while exaggerating it enough to entertain and amuse.

I had to stop reading this book when I realized it was overdue at the library. I have doubts about whether I’ll ever finish it. The strength is that the author accurately conveys what it’s like to be a dork. The fault is that I’m not interested in reading what it’s like to be a dork. I know plenty of dorks and what makes them dorks is their social ineptitude—talking way too long about something way too uninteresting. I don’t want to know your latest band name, band credits, first album, song lyrics, especially when I know nothing is going to come of it. This dorkiness, as well as a schizophrenia of storylines that I can’t keep straight 200 pages into the book, make it too long and too tedious. I’m not interested, and I’m no longer willing to invest my time in it.

The brief book report for King Dork is that while it was cute, I really kept wishing that Milo Aukerman had written it instead. Maybe I’m just a little annoyed at how the narrator (granted, a 14 year old boy) gets head from not one, but two hot chicks and it never occurs to him to reciprocate. Or that the totally cool, smart, funny girl in his French class is actually much sexier than the two babes he’s lusting after.