I usually don’t follow what reviewers say. They often inject their own prejudices into a review. Especially one that deals with a potentially touchy subject. I prefer to go to the source (which I highly recommend everyone to do) and come to my own conclusions. However, this book is $12 on Amazon and I just don’t feel like spending that much to check this out. I did look at the review and have some issues with it. And I quote:
1 “Aching for a good time.” Is this really an adult man talking about pictures of himself as a child? Or is it a creepy neighbor thinking about a boy who lives down the street?
2 “That’s what kids should do, they should laugh. If there’s a better, righter sound in the whole world than the laughter of children, I don’t know what it is.” What a creepy statement. Adult men don’t think about kids this way. Adult men don’t dwell on children.
Aching for a good time? There is nothing overtly sexual about that. It is an interpretation the reviewer is making.
Kids laughing? Oh horrors, why would kids laugh? Why is it unreasonable for a man to think that is a good thing?
3 “But there’s one thing I’d never tell Nick in a million years, not that it really matters: in fourth grade, at a church youth-group meeting, out in the bushes behind the parsonage, I touched Doug Goble’s dick, and he touched mine. In fact, there were even some mouths involved. It’s not something I’d even think about all these years later, except that Goble is the hottest real-estate agent in Kitsap County. His face is all over town — signs, billboards, Christ, even on shopping carts. Do you know what I think three times a day when I see his picture? I wonder, all these years later, why he just kicked our friendship to the curb like that. Was it shame?”
It was more likely rampant homophobia.
4 “What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick?” I said. … “What if I told you I sucked it?” … “I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s dick in my mouth.” “All I could think about while he was chatting me up over the rim of his cappuccino was his little salamander between my fourth-grade fingers, rapidly engorging with blood.”
Okay, this part probably shouldn’t be in a book for young children, but I think most teens can survive that thought. He is clearly considering an adult, with whom he had a fondly remembered childhood experience, and contemplating a current interest as an adult with that adult. As for reminiscing about an experience as child, with another child and not being horrified by it, does not make the character a pedophile. Gay maybe.
This reviewer seems more like an uptight, prudish, moralistic, righteous, straitlaced, blue-nosed Victorian, rather than an honest critic.