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(More customer reviews)I started to underline the funny lines to pull out for quotes, but I had to stop, because I was underlining the whole book.
Patterns is a coming of age novel about a seventeen-year-old boy from the wrong part of Northern Virginia. His father abandoned him early in life, his mother is an infantile alcoholic, and his stepfather is a chronically unemployed wife beater. All the present action takes place in a juvenile detention center, where Jacob is being held for attempted armed robbery of a convenience store. Pretty grim stuff. But Rathbone manages a tricky feat: she makes the book a delight to read, a rollicking adventure, a hilarious romp through the twisted mind of a teenager with a sharp wit and enough attitude and energy to power a whole novel.
The book is framed as journal entries Jacob writes every evening, and the action covers the last few months of Jacob's time as a prisoner, ending with a short narrative of what happens to him after he gets out. It's written in the first person and present tense, which gives it an immediacy that pulls the reader in. Jacob uses a lot of sensory information, which makes us feel like we are in the room with him.
As with most first person narratives, the driving force of this book is the voice. It's defiant and judgmental of people and things that don't seem authentic, sincere, or fair. It's confessional, unrepentant, sarcastic, clever, and honest. It is never self-indulgent or self-pitying. Because of Jacob's honesty and perceptiveness, he gains our sympathy (also, because the story is in the first person). Because he is a nonconformist bent on seeing the world in his own way, he allows himself a lot of word play and inventiveness, which makes his journal entries surprising, refreshing, and very funny.
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