Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately it’s not the book for me. DNF @ 21%.

Josh, also known as Bugboy, is friends with a group of "Defectives" in a New Jersey school in the early 1960's. When Ashleigh first comes to sit at his table for lunch, he can't see any visible defects and is sure that it's a trick being played on them by the "Normals." But Ashleigh has her own issues and insists she belongs with their group. Their friendship unfolds over the years, and Josh soon learns for himself why she feels the way she does.

I first read this book when it was still titled The Girl With Brazil Nut Eyes, as Ashleigh has wide, expressive eyes that Josh frequently describes as Brazil nut eyes. With either title, it's Ashleigh that's the focal point of the story, not Josh, even though he's the narrator. She's a clever girl with psychiatric issues, which is portrayed in a very unflinching and honest way. It's often the punchline or a plot point, as opposed to simply another facet about Ashleigh that we get to know, like her eye shape. Josh has a crush on her, but their friendship is important to him and is beautifully written. The end of the story is a surprise so that it's almost a sucker punch after being lulled into a complacent coming of age story.

All of the characters here were fun to read about, even the ones that Josh doesn't discuss at length. Every teen will recognize pieces of themselves in Josh and his friends, as being an awkward teenager is universal and not just part of the 60's. If not for the Kennedy assassination mentioned in the text, as a matter of fact, this is a story that could take place in almost any decade.

Is Bugboy his real name? He is called this by everyone. At first he didn't like it, but then later he was okay with it, at school, he sits in the lunch room with the "defectives" which they call themselves. When a new girl sits at their table, he tells her she doesn't belong at this table. She disagrees and becomes part of them. Ashleigh (the new girl) and Bugboy becomes best friend. They walk to his home after school and do their homework in his bedroom. Then he walks her home. When Ashleigh is rushed to the hospital one night, she has to have emergency surgery. The doctors discover that Ashleigh has been cutting herself so she is sent to the psych ward. She is devastated when the kids at school found out and the bully teases her about it. Meanwhile Bugboy is given a scholarship to a school that will help develop his art skills. He decides to go after Ashleigh and others encourage him to go. He has to stay at the school. One night he receives a phone call that upsets him.

This is a book with many different topics touched upon such as being "crazy," having something that makes a person different from others, bullying, and true friendship. The novel is told through Bugboy's eyes. I found the novel engrossing and could not stop reading or thinking about it. The author has written an absorbing story. It needs to be read by adults too as I feel that it will help adults understan
d teenage angst. Don't miss out!!

This novel is a sweet—though almost traumatic—review of the coming of age journey of Josh, aka Bugboy. The focal point of the story is not the narrator, but rather his long-term crush, Ashleigh. A cast of friends that Josh lovingly calls “The Defectives” helps to flesh-out the story. Although she bears no visible issues, Ashleigh insists that she belongs to this group of defectives. High points and low points in the relationship between Josh and Ashleigh, the girl with brazil nut eyes, converge to one very unexpected climax. (The entire book felt as if it could be based on real events. I kept thinking about youths I have known who have had some of the same issues in their lives—making me wonder how and where they are now.). What a touching story!

2.5 stars....
First of all, I couldn't find this on goodreads, maybe that's why so few knows it... And I've read it like couple of weeks ago and was waiting for it to show up on goodreads so I can add it on my Reading Challenge there.

Here's the thing about this novel, you have to read it with the right headspace for this kind of story. No, story isnt the right term NARRATION is. This is one of those flashback narrations told by someone who is reminiscing, reflecting on what happened to his life back then and hoping it might teach people in some way. Only this novel, BUGBOY is telling us the story about when he was fourteen and met this girl Ashleigh.

The reason why I gave this 2.5 stars because of its simplicity and as I said I was in the right headspace to read this kind of novels. But its simplicity is also its problem. It's just a story told by someone. Nothing actually interesting in the novel that might give impact to the reader. And that's a problem because flashbacks should be about giving an impact to the reader maybe learned from it or I don't know, cry for that part of the narrator's life was gone. I think the problem is the book didn't deliver in it's full potential.

It could be better. :)

At the start of this tale, we aren't told the narrator's age, but it doesn't take long to figure out that "Bugboy" is an adult telling the story of his teen years and how he came to know Ashleigh. Being the object of Bugboy's affection, Ashleigh is prominent throughout the book as are our narrator's group of friends. The biggest problem for this reader was that the entire story reads like an embellished memory - we're being told the story of this fellow's teen years, but there's little in the way of showing to draw a reader into the story. Even with the disconnection, I did keep reading, but it was more out of curiosity about where this story was going than anything else. What I found was a whole lot about baseball, a couple of math lessons, and a young girl who is seen through the rose-colored glasses of an admirer. The story does have some tragedy, but that disconnection I spoke of keeps it more in the abstract than it should've been.
In the end, the story comes across as a long-winded memory with a few interesting bits thrown in.

Erratum: It's not Kerr Dullea! The actor's name is Keir Dullea.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was offered on Net Galley as a 'read now' and I've found those to be a mixed bag. Some are gems, but often those books are ones which people have not been interested in because they are not very interesting; others are interesting to a few but not to all because they specialize in some niche which may or may not have very wide appeal. For me this book was not a worthy read because it just struck me as odd, in the writing, in the subject matter, and in the ending.

There are two main characters are a fourteen-year-old boy named Josh, and a girl of similar age named Ashleigh. The story is told as one long flashback by Josh in his fifties, who is recalling events (down to verbatim conversations, yet!). This means it's in first person and a flashback, both of which I tend to truly detest. This did not help me to like this novel. If people are relating a story about something that happened years ago, or even days ago for that matter, they do not do it verbatim and go into every detail - most of which they cannot remember, and those of which they do remember having been inevitably modified (sometimes stupendously) from the reality.

I think first person novels need to have some sort of warning on the front cover akin to the one on cigarette packs so those of us who like realistic stories can avoid them as though they were Madagascar (which currently has the plague FYI). No one can remember verbatim conversations from fifty years ago, so this was a constant reminder that I was reading a novel, and that the narrator was an unreliable one. I did not trust his recollection.

Om top of this, the story was disjointed and as manic as Ashleigh was supposed to be (although she showed little evidence of it - that part was all tell and no show). The novel jumped around too much, especially in his reminiscence of that one summer, which was less of a story than it was a list of events, and it swung from high to low like the novel itself was bipolar.

As a character, Ashleigh made no sense to me at all. I know that people who have depression and phobias and those kinds of problems cannot always logically argue themselves out of it because the very fears are irrational and in depression, your own mind is betraying you, but it can be done to an extent; yet here we have Ashleigh, described in the blurb and in the book as 'beautiful' and 'brilliant' (notice the beauty always comes first as though that's the most important quality a woman can have, nothing else being quite that crucial) being portrayed as completely helpless before her own issues. Instead of making her looks strong and heroic, this rendered her weak and dumb.

That doesn't mean she could have magically cured herself, but it does mean she ought to have been a somewhat different character than she was. That said, since she never exhibited any illness - we are always told about it, never shown it as it happens, I guess she had no need to try to figure ways to fight it! That is, of course, a huge problem with first person: nothing can happen unless Josh witnesses it personally or is told about it in long expository paragraphs. Rather than bring her to the fore and make her stand out, this pushed Ashleigh into the background, turning her role into a walk on part instead of making it a starring one in Josh's self-obsessed home movie of his life.

The idea here is that Josh is called 'Bugboy' because he has some sort of hip problem which means he cannot walk normally, walking instead with his legs splayed to the side somewhat. This is described cruelly by fellow students as walking like an insect, hence his nickname. It's painful for him to walk very far we're told, but we're never told anything about what medical treatment he's getting, if any, or advice he's been given about exercise or therapy aimed at working to improve his condition (if any).

I know this was set some thirty years or more prior to the guy telling us about it, but medicine was not exactly in the dark ages in the late eighties, and this lack of attention to treatment of his condition makes it look almost like he's faking it for attention. He's not, of course, but that's one impression this writing can give.

The 'Brazil-nut-eyed' part of the title comes from the fact that Ashleigh has large eyes but Brazil nuts speak more of color than of size and of hardness, which doesn't describe her eyes at all, so the title made no sense. The misheard lyrics to Madonna's La Isla Bonita describing a girl with 'eyes like potatoes' is much more evocative (if not what she actually sang!). Even calling her pecan-eyes or better yet, walnut-eyes would have sounded better to my mind.

Ashleigh comes one day unannounced to sit at the 'defectives' table in the school cafeteria. The occupants of this table describe themselves as defectives because they all have one issue or another and they found themselves drawn together not because they necessarily wanted to hang out with all the others, but because they were rejected by everyone else.

This was a bit hard to believe, but possible, I guess. It's really been overdone though in teen exploitation movies and comedies. 'Bags' has bags under his eyes and was asthmatic (or something like it - their various conditions were left startlingly vague). Stuttsman (eye-roll) had a stutter. Veronica had a bright red "birthmark" on one cheek. Samantha had a limp. The real defect here though, was that all of these purported defectives were sweet, friendly, smart, thoughtful people who all became successful in later life, while everyone else was a cruel tyrant and ultimately a loser. So were were expected to believe. It was not realistic.

What was truly hard to believe was why Ashleigh joined them. It was never really explained. Yes, we were told (not shown) that she felt defective because of her mental insecurities, but this was never convincing and unlike the others, we never heard stories about her being rejected by anyone. She seemed perfectly capable of latching on to anyone and befriending them, so this failed for me.

it was equally a fail that none of the school bullies got any sort of comeuppance, but the story ended rather hurriedly and rather haphazardly, so I guess this was just let go like too many other things. The story never felt wrapped up for me. For example, while we learn a bit about the other 'defectives' in later life, we hear almost nothing about Josh. it felt odd, like it has been vacuumed ans scrubbed clean of anything interesting. even his career choice was predictable and unsurprising.

I am not a fan of baseball, so the endless detailed references to baseball including whole paragraphs and groups of paragraphs made me numb, and I skipped them unread. Some to the text which didn't even mention baseball was like this too, so the story became even more disjointed than it already was with jumping so many boring paragraphs. Maybe baseball fans will love this, but many others will not.

If you think this is a love story it isn't. Maybe you think then, that it's a story about friendship, but if that's what it was, then the friendship itself was decidedly odd and one-sided. It could have been the kind of story where the friendship grew naturally into a romance, but it never went there; quite the opposite in fact.

The two of them never kissed, never really held hands, never had any sort of real intimate moments, and never talked about their feelings for one another even as a friendship. The whole relationship came off as cold and clinical at best, and as Ashleigh cynically using Josh at worst. It felt like the two were hanging out together not because of any attraction to each other for whatever reason, but because of a repulsion from everyone else, or because both of them had fallen down a well, and were stuck together until one or both of them could get out somehow.

There was neither love nor romance, which is fine for me because that is so overdone in books like this that it's tedious to read, but that said, the friendship didn't really go anywhere and it was, I felt, betrayed by Ashleigh towards the end when she started keeping secrets from Josh, her (we're told, not shown) best friend.

In short this story did not work in my opinion. It felt a bit like the 1991 movie My Girl with the genders reversed, and it did not impress me any more than that did, so I cannot recommend it as a worthy read. The Newbery people might like it, but from me that's not a recommendation.