Book #8 Matthew Quick’s Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

As I sit down to write this entry, I just heard the story about the school shooting in Colorado—it’s so scary to be a parent and have to worry about school shootings in addition to all of the usual worries parents have (I’m terrified at the fact Emery will drive a car someday). I can’t imagine how those parents in Colorado, or anywhere else school shootings have happen, feel.

School shootings is a subject a few young adult authors have taken up; the last one I remember trying to read was Jennifer Brown’s Hate List, which I couldn’t finish, but I’m told is good.

Matthew Quick’s protagonist Leonard Peacock is a teenaged boy who brings a gun to school for the purpose of committing a murder/ suicide later that day. I think that’s all I’m going to say because I don’t want to give too much away. But, first, here are some things Quick’s book makes me think about:

1.   I despise parents who are absent in their teenagers’ lives. For example, the parents in Anderson’s Speak are atrocious. Are there really parents out there who are so pre-occupied with their lives that they ignore their children to such an extreme?

2.   Authors like Quick, Asher, Anderson, Walter Dean Myers, and Hopkins (not to mention Sapphire’s Push, which I couldn’t finish either) introduced me to characters who experienced horrific acts—ones I could have never imagined, and I so wish don’t exist. And, often they have no control over what happens to them.

3.   Which makes me want to cry. As with Gerald from Reality Boy, I grow to love these characters and I want things to go well for them—exceedingly well—I want their parents to “WAKE UP” or for them to win scholarships or something. But, these superb authors resist giving readers unrealistic contrived endings that makes one wonder what will happen to them.

I like Quick’s work and Boy 21 is one of my all-time favorite ya books. FM,LQ is great, yet I’ll probably suggest it to older readers. And, Mr. Quick, thank you for giving us yet another fabulous teacher.

I think I’m going to try to find a fantasy book to read next.