Sour Apples: A Novel For Those Who Hate To Read by Paul Jantzen

Sour Apples was a really enjoyable read, a real American boys’ tale of summer. Our hero is Jimmy Hamilton, a lively boy who starts off the book with a tree fort but as his mother’s fears about the relative safety of such a structure grow (and justifiably so), it looks like the fort’s days are numbered, much to Jimmy’s irritation.

But all is not lost as Jimmy’s dad has a plan and it is the result of this around which a lot of the action of the book revolves.

Jimmy is, in a lot of ways, a typical eleven year old boy: he doesn’t like to read despite his mother’s attempts to get him to the library and there is, as you would expect, a resistance which is a thread throughout the book. But when it comes to baseball and meeting up with his friends, Dave, Chad and Kevin, Jimmy shows all the enthusiasm in the world.

I think that Jantzen’s book achieves what it sets out to do: his eleven year boys are not concerned with much other than forts and sports with girls making their presence felt on the margins, sometimes as attractive prospects and other times as annoyances that need to be avoided. The other things that figure strongly in Jimmy’s world are dead things, animals in particular, which the boys have a morbid curiosity with whenever they find them. These are incidental in the text, before you think it’s morbid, and Jantzen’s inclusion of them speaks truly of the things that fascinate kids. All things icky and nasty hold a charm.

I’ve given the book four stars and stand by this but in the context of being a book which would not necessarily appeal to all: it is a book that flows, is consistent, has scenes which are well evoked and characters that are well delineated but I think that it is a book for people looking for a nostalgic read from a certain generation or for boys who share the same interests, fears and hopes as Jimmy. It reads like a middle years book at times and if it wasn’t for some swearing, relevant again to the situation where it’s found in the action of the story, I think that early teens would enjoy it.

All that said, as a fifty something British woman, I did enjoy it and it was easy to read.