(2 stars out of 5) Maniac Magee, July 15, 2005
A Kid’s Review
Maniac Magee was an ok book. The only good part was when Maniac went crazy. Other wise it was all bad. Maniac Magee’s parent die in a trolly crash. See this is the book is really bad. You just don’t lose your parents in a trolly crash. If I wrote this book I would say the parents were murder by a bad person. So lets get back to the point. Maniac meet a new friend named Amanda. She likes books. What a nerd. Then he meet Mars Bar. No he didn’t meat a candy bar.
Is this from Amazon.com or something? I’ll agree with the kid on one thing: in this country you really “just don’t” lose your parents in a trolly crash – being murdered by a bad man is much more likely. (But that’s only if you want to be realistic about things in the present day – the book may be set in an earlier time period, or maybe dying in a trolly crash is meant to be amusingly offbeat, like James’ [of the Giant Peach fame] parents being killed by a wild rhinoceros.)
The book is set in fairly modern times. Let’s see… I’m 23, so it’s been 12 or 13 years since I read it, at which point it struck me as set in the mid-70s. The Mars Bar of which our young reviewer speaks is, iirc, a young black gangbanger-type who I seem to remember as vaguely shucking and possibly jiving, thus the odd name. He refers to the main character as a “honky” and a “fishbelly” at different points in the book.
It’s aimed at fifth-graders or so, which makes the review all the more depressing.
What’s really depressing is the fact that you could show this to the then-child who wrote it ten years ago and he/she would look at it and say,“Yeah, so?”
