Today’s book review is of “Jasper Jones” by Craig Silvey.
This story follows Charlie as he’s suddenly thrown into a mystery with the town of Corrigan’s “bad boy”, the two must figure out who did ‘it’ and figure out how to prove it before the town– as always– points their fingers to Jasper.
One night, Jasper Jones knocks on Charlie’s window, telling him that he needs Charlie to trust him. Looking for excitement, Charlie says yes and agrees to follow Jasper into the dark of the night. They travel on foot to a secret glade where Jasper spends a lot of his time. There, they discover ‘it’. (for the sake of spoilers I’m not going to state what ‘it’ is– though it might be hinted). Scared out of his mind Charlie wants to immediately report the incident, though Jasper brings up one vital point. Jasper is the only one who knew how to get to the hidden glade, the finger will inevitably point to him and he’d be put away for something he didn’t do. It’s then up to the two of them to find out who actually did it and quickly, before ‘it’ is truly discovered.
This book honestly had me hooked from the minute Jasper knocked on Charlie’s window. Each step of the way felt like I was being taken deeper and deeper into the story and I was eager to know the results (which I actually pretty much had a good idea a little more than halfway through the book). The storyline is very nice and I didn’t have much trouble in picking it up and resuming where I left off.
One of my favorite aspects of the book is ‘Mad Jack Lionel’, it has a very ‘Boo Radley’ effect to it and I find it especially hilarious since Atticus Finch is mentioned numerous times through out the book, meaning while Charlie has clearly read the book and therefore knows how the situation with ‘Boo Radley’ ends, he’s still utterly petrified of ‘Mad Jack Lionel’. Once its revealed who Jack truly is, I was blown away. And also really really REALLY sad.
The end I totally did see coming, and there is one character who seems to be the blame of ‘it’ due only to lack of empathy (which is also shown in the end of the book) and while I find that lacking personality trait a bit alarming, the character is also one of my favorites in the book despite not really seeming to have a terribly important of a role.
Overall this book was really well written and was a very good read (thank you Rachel for your suggestion lol). And I’ve actually learned it’s to become a movie soon, wow imagine that.
The only thing I didn’t particularly like was the bad bits of grammar that Charlie and Jasper seemed to show (and I also didn’t like Charlie’s mothers bad attitude nor did I particularly like the law enforcement or sports teams oops). I also wasn’t a huge fan of how long the chapters were but that’s only a minor issue. These are all simple things that were easily brushed aside due to the quality of the story itself.
I would definitely recommend this book and I rate it a solid 4/5 stars.
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