Sucked In (John Parker, Walker Books, $12.95 pb, ISBN 9781921150623, May) **

Sucked In is a rather ordinary example of the short fiction intended for boys of 10 to12 years. All the standard elements of fiction aimed at this audience are here—humour based around bodily functions, slapstick comedy, the tried and true horror plot device and finally, the surprise ending. It is more than a little derivative—hasn’t the author heard of Emily Eyefinger?—and none of it really works well at all. Class runt Martin Zainey inexplicably sells his prized in order to purchase a disembodied eye advertised in the back of his comic book. Narrator and pseudo-friend Dan Hoskins puts two and two together and decides to save Zainey from his own stupidity (I say pseudo-friend because Dan is just as quick as everyone else to make fun of Zainey). The story progresses steadily through the standard plot elements—fart jokes, slapstick scene complete with bouncing eyeball, embarrassing moment outside the girls’ bathroom and so on. And this is the whole problem with the book—the plot is predictable, the characters are predictable and even the twist in the ending is predictable. Sadly, the author is unable to transform these stock elements into something memorable.

Liz Riley is a former bookseller and now works for the Australian Booksellers Association

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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