Review: Reality Boy by A.S. King

Reality Boy

Author: A.S. King

Pages: 368

Publication Date: October 22, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Gerald Faust knows exactly when he started feeling angry: the day his mother invited a reality television crew into his five-year-old life. Twelve years later, he’s still haunted by his rage-filled youth—which the entire world got to watch from every imaginable angle—and his anger issues have resulted in violent outbursts, zero friends, and clueless adults dumping him in the special education room at school.

Nothing is ever going to change. No one cares that he’s tried to learn to control himself, and the girl he likes has no idea who he really is. Everyone’s just waiting for him to snap…and he’s starting to feel dangerously close to doing just that.

In this fearless portrayal of a boy on the edge, highly acclaimed Printz Honor author A.S. King explores the desperate reality of a former child “star” who finally breaks free of his anger by creating possibilities he never knew he deserved.

A.S. King is one of those authors that I've seen other bloggers that give high praise for. I was sort of debating whether I wanted to read  of her other books, Everybody Sees the Ants or Please Ignore Vera Dietz, but after seeing of the cover of Reality Boy last year, I really wanted to read this one first. Only because the cover was absolutely eye-catching. That burst of colour was seriously hard to resist. After finishing Reality Boy, I'm happy that it wasn't just a pretty cover, the content was absolutely gut-wrenching and completely raw with the voice of teen who suffered from fame. 

Usually I steer away from books that contained celebrities or the Hollywood life but with Reality Boy, it was a completely different story. Yes, we're given a story of a young celebrity star, but Gerald Faust was no ordinary celebrity.  When he was younger, his parents sent a letter to the producers, wanting the Network Nanny to come in and hopefully control Gerald. In the reality tv show, Gerald was famous for crapping everywhere. He would take #2 on his sister, Tasha's bed, on his mom's shoes, basically a lot of places in the house. Even though it wasn't quite pleasant to read that, he was only five years old. I mean, it's really common for children to do that, but with Gerald, he was being filmed while he was doing it. Ever since his life was shown to whole world, Gerald's life has been a wreck as he struggled with controlling his anger. 

One of the things that I loved most about this book was Gerald Faust. A perfectly flawed character. I absolutely loved how A.S. King wrote about anger management. Seeing Gerald struggle and trying to control his anger was true character development. I love reading characters arguing with their thoughts and emotions. They know its bad, but they still feel the need to hurt them. There were times where Gerald walked away from fights and times where he let his fist fly to another person's jaw. Even though what Gerald did wasn't good, but the way with people treated him, it was completely understandable. 

Reality Boy was achingly real as A.S King writes a novel of a boy whose life has been destroyed by fame. A brilliant five stars, this will definitely not be my last A.S King book.