Family Book Club: Paperboy

After what felt like an interminably long time we finally finished reading Paperboy! Our reading time has been a bit hit and miss this summer because we have been so busy and gone a lot. I'm hoping to get back into a more consistent routine once school starts, though that may be hard with a high schooler in the mix! Paperboy by Vince Vawter is a somewhat autobiographical memoir about a boy with a severe stuttering problem. It's actually pretty difficult to read because of the stuttering and also because the author chose to not use commas....like ever! The grammar enthusiast in me felt slightly offended every time I read the book and had to insert commas in all the correct spots! To me this was just an okay book. I probably wouldn't recommend it. There were some really strange things, like a 30 something year old woman flirting with her 11 year old paperboy. Huh? Why? I pretty much edited out those parts as best I could. Also, there were lots of unresolved issues in the novel which you generally don't see in middle grade fiction. I wasn't incredibly inspired by what to do for our book club either, which is probably why we found ourselves throwing newspapers at laundry baskets out on the lawn and causing the neighbors to wonder about our sanity! I can just imagine them saying "Don't ya'll have cable?" Well....actually no. Which is why we throw newspapers at laundry baskets in our spare time.

We started the night by having a dinner of biscuits and gravy with sausage and eggs. In the book there's a fairly traumatic event and the next morning Mam, the nanny, makes Little Man his favorite breakfast of B&G and they talk about it. They agree that he can ask any questions he wants but after the breakfast is over they won't ever talk about it again.

 After dinner we talked about the author and about what a memoir is. We also did a quiz that I found online. We got 22/25 questions correct even though a few seemed like trick questions to me. Then we did a newspaper scavenger hunt. I bought 4 different newspapers and they had to use them to find things like an ad for a red car, a job listing, a house for over $200,000, or a story about an act of bravery, etc. (that last one was actually really difficult!) I wasn't sure how well this activity would go over but they actually seemed to really get in to it.

Then we went outside and practiced our Paperboy skills by trying to throw rolled up newspapers into laundry baskets. Garrett was our overall winner on that game.

Last of all we came in and had some pie and ice cream. It was supposed to be a fried peach pie but they didn't have that in the freezer section at Walmart! (and I couldn't be bothered to make one myself!)

Now we are moving on to reading Fish in a Tree which I've heard lots of great things about! Hopefully it does not disappoint!