Day Twenty-Three Review: Colin Fischer

22 April, 2013 0 comments Article Big Review Challenge, Review, YA

Title: Colin Fischer
Author: Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz

Who’s it for? Teen

What’s it about? Colin Fischer doesn’t like to be touched. Or the colour blue. He avoids eye contact unless absolutely necessary. Sherlock Holmes has a place of honour on his wall. His room is a shrine to clear-headed logic. When a phone rings loudly in class, Colin can’t cope. So he barks like a dog. But when a gun goes off in the school cafeteria he isn’t scared. He’s curious … Colin Fischer is determined to discover who fired that gun.

(Blurb taken from book)

What’s good about it? Colin is wonderful and the way he looks at the world and deals with its strangeness is utterly fascinating. His relationships with his classmates and his family are brilliantly done, but I most loved his interactions with his parents and Mr Turrentine. The contrast between those two differing relationships is interesting too; his parents, familiar and practised in their handling of him, respecting his boundaries; Mr Turrentine, not taking no for an answer, brashly – yet patiently – teaching him basketball.

Colin’s notebook is awesome. It fit perfectly with him and imparted some interesting insights into Colin’s thought processes.

I also have much love for any character who has posters of Spock and Data on his wall.

What’s bad about it? There’s a lot of ‘tell not show’ – the majority of it is fine, but especially at the beginning it occasionally got a bit much. I found the footnotes to be an odd mix of fascinating and irritating.

The verdict? Colin is a brilliant character, one so very easy to warm to and I did enjoy the central mystery surrounding who fired the gun (although it did seem a tad obvious as to who the culprit was). The writing style follows Colin’s thought patterns and seeing the world through his eyes is great. However, there was a little too much tell not show for my liking and I did veer between really enjoying the writing style and hating it. All in all a good read with a cracking set of characters.

Day Twenty-Three Review: Colin Fischer

Leave a Reply Cancel reply