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Overview
Losers, now you can get the bad-boy rep the girls find positively irresistible! Unleash your dark side with the Doug Schaffer plan for drug addiction and rehabilitation! (Kids, don't try this at home.)
At sixteen years old, Doug Schaffer knows two things for sure:
1. He is doomed to live in the shadow of his older brother, Trevor, a former high school football star who is stationed in Iraq.
2. Free-spirited Laurilee, the hot ear-piercing girl at the mall, only dates bad boys.
Cue Doug's foolproof plan to tarnish his own unremarkable reputation. The first step is to develop a drug addiction. His mom's too preoccupied with organizing care packages for Mothers Support Our Troops Northwest Oklahoma City Chapter to stop him. Besides, he just needs to get hooked on meth long enough to come back from rehab a totally different person. Someone people notice.
With the help of Trevor’s strung-out former high-school buddy, drug addict Doug has the confidence that loser Doug never mustered. He stays out all night, scores girls, and stands up for himself. Then Trevor unexpectedly returns home with a dark secret of his own, and everything Doug thought was true is shattered. Soon the brothers find a common ground they never knew they shared as they discover the price of pleasing others is the freedom to be yourself.
Synopsis
Losers, now you can get the bad-boy rep the girls find positively irresistible! Unleash your dark side with the Doug Schaffer plan for drug addiction and rehabilitation! (Kids, don't try this at home.)
At sixteen years old, Doug Schaffer knows two things for sure:
1. He is doomed to live in the shadow of his older brother, Trevor, a former high school football star who is stationed in Iraq.
2. Free-spirited Laurilee, the hot ear-piercing girl at the mall, only dates bad boys.
Cue Doug's foolproof plan to tarnish his own unremarkable reputation. The first step is to develop a drug addiction. His mom's too preoccupied with organizing care packages for Mothers Support Our Troops Northwest Oklahoma City Chapter to stop him. Besides, he just needs to get hooked on meth long enough to come back from rehab a totally different person. Someone people notice.
With the help of Trevor’s strung-out former high-school buddy, drug addict Doug has the confidence that loser Doug never mustered. He stays out all night, scores girls, and stands up for himself. Then Trevor unexpectedly returns home with a dark secret of his own, and everything Doug thought was true is shattered. Soon the brothers find a common ground they never knew they shared as they discover the price of pleasing others is the freedom to be yourself.
Publishers Weekly
This coming-of-age debut about a 16-year-old's attempt to get popular by becoming a drug addict is charming, poignant, and engrossing—to a point. “I am just another kid in another mall with ripped jeans and doodles on his Converses,” says Doug Schaffer, and he's not entirely wrong. Angry with his single mom because she spends all of her time thinking about his “pigskin pope” football-hero brother who's off in Iraq, and fixated on a girl from the mall where he works, Doug is painfully self-aware that he is a cliché. But through Sloan's on-point writing, Doug comes alive, even if he doesn't come close to achieving his goal of becoming “a meth addict, or I will kill myself trying.” He runs with the idea long enough, though, to step outside the skin of a high school dork to be turned on to nightclubs, parties, girls, and being thought of as something special. The ending, though, is a disappointment. Once Doug's brother returns, the sharp, uncommon narrative turns as dismissive as any parent who ever wished their kid would just shut up. (June)