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Reviewed by:
  • When Mr. Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan
  • Karen Coats
Conaghan, Brian. When Mr. Dog Bites. Bloomsbury, 2014. [320p] ISBN 978-1-61963-346-9 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10.

Scottish teen Dylan Mint has Tourette’s, with symptoms including coprolalia (uncontrollable swearing), and he attends a special school for kids with disabilities. Even when he’s not tic-ing, he has a way with colorful language, and he has developed his own kind of slang. He also has issues with understanding adults, though, which cause him to misinterpret a cryptic conversation between his mother and her doctor to mean that he is going to die in March. He immediately makes a bucket list that includes his three preoccupations: he wants to have sex, ensure the social happiness of his friend Amir, and see his father, whom he thinks is deployed in a war zone, once more. Dylan confronts the racism that plagues Amir head-on, and he is open and irreverent about the circumstances of attending a school for teens with special needs, even if he focuses mostly on negative teasing and bullying; indeed, the only kindness among peers we see is between him and Amir as they try to figure out girls and discuss the meaning of their friendship. Dylan’s Tourette’s makes him vulnerable outside of school as well, as is evidenced by an incident that hovers between a serious wedgie and a scary rape (from which he emerges none the worse for wear). While the book does a nice job of showing a teen coping with more than his disorder, the misunderstanding about his dying is so clumsily handled that even inexperienced readers will call it out as a device and wonder how Dylan could be so naïve. Dylan’s thickly local jargon may also be a challenge, but since much of it bears on taboo subjects such as racism, sex, and disability, teens will laugh their way through to find Dylan’s heart of gold. [End Page 566]

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