Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (review)

After shocking his teacher into quitting with his avant-garde sex-ed film project, La Dolce Pubert (a story told in How to Get Suspended and Influence People, BCCB 5/07), Leon and the other members of the gifted pool are faced with the daunting task of coming up with a project that will top the last one without going too far over the top. The assignment is to create a monument, and while two of the boys attempt to get their sadistic and gifted kid–hating gym teacher to commit suicide so that they can erect a monument over his body, Leon and his maybe-girlfriend Anna, along with communist Edie and her mini-MacGyver boyfriend Brian, decide to do a filmed monument to the dying downtown area. They plan to take over the large-chain coffee shop that they feel is symptomatic of all that is wrong with McBusiness everywhere and turn it into an office to see if anyone notices. Unlike the previous book, where Selzer nailed early adolescent preoccupations and humor preferences with lots of bodily humor and explosions, this premise may prove a bit too slick for the target audience—the humor here depends on retail chain exhaustion, which for many teens is a late acquisition, if it appears at all. Leon's unusual dilemma of being a dork faced with choosing between the advances of two girls takes up too much of the narrative space without moving things along. His parents, though, live up to their comic potential: they continue their pursuit of food disasters, and his dad, through an unfortunate attempt to create a new hair dye, ends up with first a green Mohawk, and then a sort of spiky rhino horn for his trouble. There are thus laughs to be had here; patrons with a penchant for thrift stores and bad coffee will be best suited appreciate the full impact of the jokes.