Winger

Title: Winger
Author: Andrew Smith
Pages: 439
Publication: May 2013

Summary: Ryan Dean West is a fourteen-year-old junior at a boarding school for rich kids. He’s living in Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troublemakers, and rooming with the biggest bully on the rugby team. And he’s madly in love with his best friend Annie, who thinks of him as a little boy.

With the help of his sense of humor, rugby buddies, and his penchant for doodling comics, Ryan Dean manages to survive life’s complications and even find some happiness along the way. But when the unthinkable happens, he has to figure out how to hold on to what’s important, even when it feels like everything has fallen apart.

Filled with hand-drawn info-graphics and illustrations and told in a pitch-perfect voice, this realistic depiction of a teen’s experience strikes an exceptional balance of hilarious and heartbreaking

My Thoughts: I truly, truly enjoyed this book. I cannot remember the last time I read such a funny, heart-touching YA novel. I laughed, I cried, then I laughed again, and when I finished it I did not want it to end.

And that is what is so endearing about Winger.  It had countless "laugh-out-loud" moments and numerous crude humor jokes that had me nearly in stitches (when you read the book you'll understand the association with stitches and that I was making a feeble attempt at being clever here).

For every funny moment there was a sweet one, or as I like to put it, for every "ha!" there was an "aww!" and I wouldn't have had it any other way. I even found myself showing my friends and family the bits that I thought were funny and half the time they agreed and the other half they chuckled but gave me a "you have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy" look, which I get quite often unsurprisingly.

I found the plot to be evenly paced and quite believable, too. It was at that perfect pace where I could binge read until 5 am and not bat an eye at how long I spent with this book in my hands (which happens all too often with my favorite books.

On top of that, the cartoons and animations did not detract from the book either, but instead made it a better overall reading experience. And to be quite honest, I wish I had known a Ryan Dean West when I was in high school. I'm positive that it would have made for a heck of a lot more interesting and colorful experience. So in conclusion, the answer to the question that you're all obviously thinking is yes, I am adding Ryan Dean to my fictional-characters-I-wish-I-knew-in-real-life list.

I really, really, really loved this book and I will probably be adding it to my list of favorites now. I can sense a reread coming on in the near future with this one. The reread force is strong.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars