Hard Time
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
“When we’re born, we’re sentenced to, like, life. And some of us—I’d be a prime example—are made to do hard time."
So says Annie Ireland, sentenced to a life of trying to live up to her parents’ never-ending expectations. For a long time the only person she can count on for unconditional support is her best friend, Arby, known to the horror and delight of many as “The Roach Boy.”
And then Pantagruel Primo, Esquire, comes into Annie’s life, and just like that, she has another friend, this one ageless and with special powers—and not looking like himself (at all), at first.
Suddenly, as a result of a story she writes for English class, Annie and her friends find themselves sentenced to five days in the county jail and then to an indefinite stay at the Back to Basics Center, a wilderness school for “problem” kids.
After a series of comic misadventures they manage to escape its bizarre, unpleasant clutches, and Annie comes to realize she’s unique and strong and lovable, and that it doesn’t matter what some other people think.
Delightfully ridiculous (but also timely), part fantasy and part real life, Hard Time is a humorous, sophisticated tale about one girl’s struggle to be who she is rather than the person some adults keep wanting her to become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Thompson's uneven novel, high school freshman Annie Ireland learns about Pantagruel Primo, Esquire, the magical being living inside the baby doll she was issued in her life skills class, the night he saves her from a fire. They become friends, and with his help she writes a fantasy story for English class in which a remote control device "changes the channel" on a teacher and a classmate from "alive to dead." Reading it, a scheming D.A. decides that Annie is a threat to public safety, and a judge agrees, sentencing Annie and Primo to the county jail for five days (when Arby, her soulmate, stands up for her, he receives the same sentence, for contempt of court). The threesome's lives spin further out of control when Annie's and Arby's parents send the kids to the Back to Basics Center, an expensive reform-oriented boot camp with a pair of sadistic counselors. Annie and Arby are likable, other characters are wickedly exaggerated, and the author creates some memorable moments (Primo magically improves the jail's smell by making plants appear in the cells' toilets). All in all, though, the fantasy elements are not consistently integrated into the plot, and while Primo adds color, he and his counterpart, Slurpagar the Quaint, are mostly unnecessary, except perhaps to provide a mediocre deus ex machina. Fans of the author's The Grounding of Group 6 may appreciate this equally extreme portrayal of society's suspicion of teens, but ultimately this novel never fully gels. Ages 14-up.
