Review: Saint Iggy

Going, K.L. (2006). Saint Iggy. New York: Harcourt. 260 pages.


Summary & Evaluation: Iggy's life is pretty frustrating: he's soon to be expelled from high school for something he didn't do; nobody at the high school really even likes Iggy--they all think he's addicted to drugs because he doesn't do well in school and is constantly in an agitated state; his mother (who was pregnant with Iggy while addicted to drugs, which might explain his agitated state) has left the family without saying when she'll be back; and his father cares more about his drug habit than he does anything else, especially his son. So, taking the advice of his principle, Iggy sets out to make something of himself, to do something that will make people change their minds about him. Iggy ends up achieving this by helping his (only) friend, Mo, to get out of a drug deal gone wrong--thus giving Mo a second chance to reconnect with his estranged family.

Saint Iggy was a heartbreaking novel to read. While a lot of the other YA novels that I've read so far deal with kids getting themselves into tough positions and then extracting themselves from it, Saint Iggy is all about a kid whose in a situation created almost entirely by other peoples' bad decisions. I first picked this up because I was looking for a readalike to the novel for my booktalk, A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich, mistakenly thinking it was another story about a kid hooked on drugs. I'm still going to use it for the booktalk, because it's almost the reverse story of Hero--where Benji was the drug-addled kid with everyone willing to help him, Iggy is the straight one with (almost) everyone around him addicted to drugs and in need of help. It was all that more fantastic for it, though, because it's not always the kid's fault that they're in a bad situation.

Booktalk Hook: The start of this story is just awesome--it really grips you with Iggy talking about how he got kicked out of school and was planning on making amends. Since the story's in first-person, the intro of the story is Iggy going on this rant about how unfairly he was treated and it's just so believable, the way it's written. Because of that, I'd have to read the first two pages, and I really don't think it would take much more than that to get some people interested in this book.