Retrospective Blog #2

When I think back on all the books I’ve liked I seem to agree with most of my classmates on which ones were enjoyable and which ones were… less so. However, one book, which I’ve spent 4 years defending, has unjustly earned the reputation as one of the worst books we’ve had to read in school. Rash, by Pete Hautman, was one of my favorite books going into 9th grade and so when I found out it was part of our summer reading I was glad to have an excuse to read it again. The book stood out to me as one of the few contemporary books we read in Honors English 9 as well as one of the funnier books. I won’t lie, one of the reasons I liked it was that it was a pretty easy book to read, but it also was extremely funny and the characters in the books actually felt like real people around my age. In general I also appreciate the styles of contemporary authors over the usual books we read in English class. One of the biggest regrets of my Senior year is that I will never understand why people don’t like this amazing novel. You would think that a modern book that is funny, quick to read, and designed to be read by young adults would be popular. It even was a dystopian novel being read at around the time novels like Divergent and The Hunger Games were popular. And yet, the best rebuttal to my claim that this was an amazing book is that “it was boring”.