Book review.

First Quarter Outside Reading Book Review
Boy Toy by Barry Lyga. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Genre: Modern Fiction

Boy Toy, a teen modern fiction drama by Barry Lyga, is a great way to show some of the normal and abnormal events that occur in teenage lives. Josh Mendel, the protagonist of this story, is molested at the age of twelve .Throughout out his adolescence,all; he wants is to be a normal child, like all the rest living in Brookdale. He makes up with old friends along the way and witnesses one of the hardest break ups to ever take place.

"Barry Lyga digs deep into the troubling territory of innocence and manipulation, trust and betrayal," says Tanya Lee Stone, the author of a A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl."Brave and unflinching, Boy Toy will grab hold of your heart and squeeze."

Boy Toy contains some very mature content and is not recommended for children to read. It tells what Josh thinks, feels and does throughout the course of his teen years. It shows the mean, cold-hearted side of Josh and also the sweet, caring side. His best friend Zik Lorenz, is by his side through all of Josh's troubles and problems but Josh does not realize it until he is eighteen, playing the final baseball game of their high school career and purposely misses the ball, finally realizing how he let Zik down.

Barry Lyga uses a lot of description in his writing. When I read Boy Toy, I literally felt like I was in the book, standing on the sidelines as everything takes place. It feels like whenever someone says something, you could just automatically add your two-sense and one of the characters would respond to you.

"Classes are a formality at this point-I know which colleges I'm in, and the odds of my grades deteriorating to the point that anyone would change their minds at this point are precisely zero. But I can't help myself. I can't just slack off and get B's. I've been Iron Man too long-I kill myself for these last A's like I killed myself for the hundred or so that came before" (357).

The theme was probably the most important aspect of this book. The main theme was that you can't do anything on your own. You always need someone by your side, along you to help you with things you can't do yourself. A quote from the book that shows this theme is "In order to hit a home run, someone else has to pitch the ball." I really enjoyed this book. It was the first book that I have read by Barry Lyga but I plan on reading more. I really like the way he related the events in the story to actual events that happen in real life. He even gives the characters the same feelings that people in similar situations would have. One of my friends went through molestation and told me about it. Almost everything that he said he feels today were the same things that Josh said he felt. I think that Barry Lyga is a very good author and I enjoyed every part of his writing. I think it takes a successful author to relate real life situations to a situation in a book and give a character the same feelings.