Book #119: This is What I Did

Title: This is What I Did
Author: Ann Dee Ellis

I really, really wanted to love This is What I Did. Ann Dee Ellis teaches Creative Writing at BYU and writes for Throwing Up Words, a blog that I really like about writing for the young adult audience. I did like the book, but I didn't love it as much as I was hoping to.  

There are a lot of things I admire about the book-- I like the way that Ellis tackles a difficult subject (the main character, Logan, witnesses a vicious attack on two children by one of the kids' fathers, and he doesn't do anything about it, even when the son retaliates and appears to kill his dad), I like the secondary characters (like Laurel, one of the few people who isn't afraid of Logan at his new school), and I like the way that Logan has to work through the problems that are eating at him. I also like the way that Ellis incorporates things like email messages into her text.

If you look at the cover art for This is What I Did, you see a simple line drawing of a boy on a solid background. It's spare, and so is Ellis's prose. I can't figure out if I didn't like the spareness of the prose-- the way that everything Logan says or thinks feels like it's been wrestled out of him, or if it was just the way that the other kids were so cruel to Logan (he's bullied by the kids in his scout troop, the kids at school, and basically the kids everywhere). I do think it's a story worth reading, and one that I may give to my preteen boy, who I feel may end up dealing with more than his own share of bullies someday. I think he'll like the story, and I like it too, I just think I'd like it better if it were more richly detailed and fleshed out.