[ 
Mood: Silly ]
[ 
Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
Barry Lyga’s name may be familiar to some of you. I featured his first novel, The Amazing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl in one of my What to Read After Harry columns. Boy Toy is Lyga’s second novel and is also aimed at the YA set. It is not an easy ready, but it is an important book that needs to be in most school libraries. Unfortunately, given its topic, I think this is going to quickly become one of the most banned.
Boy Toy tells the tale of Josh, a High School senior who seems to have everything going for him. He is smart, athletic and good looking. Yet he has a hair trigger temper and gets involved in fights and is frequently suspended. But this is understandable, as he was also molested by his teacher when he was twelve. His female teacher.
Lyga has been quite daring in choosing to tell the male victim of molestation by a female teacher. He is taking on the incredibly stupid myth of the older woman intiating the young man into the arts of love and points it out for the bullcrap it is. (I teach twelve year olds. I don’t find them sexually attractive. I just want to make them a sandwich.) Lyga is also walking down a road many of these stories don’t go by pointing out that not all peodophiles are men.
The author has to walks a very fine line in this book. It would be easy for this to devolve into a moralistic after-school special. Worse, it could easily have been an exploitation tale full of sexually tittalation (pun not intended). Instead, Lyga has given us a tale that hits just the the right note, with a main character who is not just a one-dimentional victim. Those around him are not perfect either and react with a varrying maturity to Josh’s situation and behaviour.
If there is a stumble, it is the ending where Josh finally confronts his abuser. Her admission of guilt comes a little too easily. But that is a minor fault when the novel as a whole is evaluated.
This book is a must read for those thinking of entering teaching as it really shows what the impact of our actions on our students are. It is also only appropriate for those students in Grade 9 and up as there are some very mature scenes. But, they need to read this book, if only to understand that predators come in all shapes and sizes. Parents would do well to also read this as Lyga knows how the youth brain works. His ear for dialogue is bang on.
Go read this.